Well put, that's in essence what I meant.
If you are using AWS anyway and are accustomed to it, obviously, RDS is a good choice. But I don't want to learn what DNS and Filesystem are called in AWS-speak just to shoehorn myself into getting stuck with AWS forever, when all I need is a hosted database so I don't have to worry about backups, etc.
My typical situation sees small to medium (virtual) servers that run software for tens to possibly thousands of users. There are plenty of use cases that aren't "google scale" and can be operated on a simple machine and can profit from a "simple" hosted DB.
Rant: Same goes for things like CDNs, I'd guess that 99% of websites don't get nearly the amount of traffic that a simple linux server couldn't handle out of the box. Let alone need sub 100ms ping responses, yet there is this weird cargo cult that requires putting your terraformed, docker stuff running javascript from with a python container with multiple layers of caching behind cloudflare because people don't dare consider simple architectures.