Ask HN: How do you deploy an API in 2023?

Are you talking about deploying for the first time or for every release cycle? The former is done infrequently, usually once. So shouldn't be a big deal. The latter has options ranging from good old SCP to CI/CD like GitHub actions etc.

So a question for you is, what exactly are you trying to optimize? And how important is that? (Unless this is just a learning opportunity)

It's only a hassle if its not automated. Look into Terraform, Ansible, Saltstack etc and spend some time writing infrastructure-as-code to automate the provisioning and management of all this stuff.

Just use Heroku until you can afford to hire a real SRE