> Is this a "good, old fashioned" single durable server type of deployment?

Yep!

> I like my systems made such that the server can die, get scaled vertically and oops data disk wiped, forget to mount volume in a container, etc. without me lifting a finger. It looks like I can do that with litestream, but I always want to hear from people who have tried it in the real world.

I can't really help you there unfortunately, but I know fly.io is trying to offer something like that.