I think calling out Durability is a bit of a straw man. Most services get their durability from S3 or some other managed database service. So they're really only making the "do it on a beefy machine argument" for the stateless portion of their service.

I agree with the other points for production services with the caveat that many workloads don't need all of those. Internal workloads or batch data processing use cases often don't need 4 9's of availability and can be done more simply and cheaply on a chonky EC2 instance.

The last point is part of our thesis for https://rowzero.io. You can vertically scale data analysis workloads way further than most people expect.