Lambdas expand infinitely, k8's can easily autoscale stateless docker containers out forever.
All for starting under a 500 dollars a month?
150$ for EKS, lambdas first X million are free, and are cheap as hell from there, cloud LB is 50 bucks a month, etc.
Not to mention all the other benefits that containers provide Infrastructure as Code, no dev environment incompatibility problems, etc..
That is UNHEARD OF historically.
I think you may have some rose colored glasses or I'm just idealistic and naieve, but it's insanely exciting what's possible for a small enterprise nowdays.
The problem nowdays imo is management. The business people have taken over tech instead of tech people running things. And people without knowledge of tech, running a tech shop always makes the job suck.