You don't really need AWS for personal weekend type of projects or small startups but for large companies, they seem to be accelerating their dependence on AWS and its not a bad thing imho, it means a standard is emerging and companies are voting with their money.

kubernetes on the other hand....think will be replaced by fargate/ecs, I still struggle to know why startups with a dozen container services need kubernetes. Not having opinionated standard creates so much complexity with endless amount of configurations.