I wouldn't call hourly snapshots backed up to S3, monitoring and replication "trivial." They aren't difficult, but most people who don't already do this will probably need to spend hours on reading docs, setting it up and testing. Good luck even finding the time if you already have a loaded schedule of development.

"beyond trivial" - perhaps from your perspective :) These days the vast majority of people who with the job title "developer" or "software engineer" only know one or two things. Given that the number of software engineers consistently grows 20% year-on-year, it means that at any given time the median developer has just 2 years of experience. It's enough to learn a narrow set of tools (bootcamps or self-taught) to become productive and start your journey. DevOps-y stuff is often not one of those things.

So tools that simplify the unfamiliar parts tend to be quite useful

Why does anybody use Heroku? It's just a layer on AWS too.

AWS is unnecessarily complicated for a common set of use cases. Layers on top that provide simplicity, and more importantly, confidence is nice.

Yeah, what exactly is hard about spinning up pg on AWS that this solves?