Get off the cloud. Go with a reputable VPS provider like OVH or Hetzner. Get a machine allocated for a fraction of the cost of your cloud bill, and install dokku (or whatever) on it. Done.
At the height of the cloud hype, we were all more than happy to pay to lift-and-shift our way to higher operating costs. Surely, then, a lift-and-shift toward lower operating costs is comparably feasible.
If anything the barriers are social. At the height of the cloud hype, we all believed we were riding unicorns to the end of a rainbow with a pot of gold waiting for us. When you believe that, of course you want to spare no expense on ensuring you have the fastest unicorn so you can get that pot of gold before anyone else can.
I doubt AWS is 10x more expensive when you consider all the costs - you have to pay for the humans to manage the servers if you do them in house.
labor savings and simplification of processes with cloud never happened; if anything they got worse, and OpEx is higher than ever.
It’s like applying to a job with a @hotmail.com address.
If you already know it then fine - use a hammer to crack a nut. But I get the feeling that it's the first port of call for people who probably suffer the learning curve without really getting anything much in return.
But I think another way to express my original point would be "Being an uncritical advocate for K8s positively correlates with having a tendency to overcomplicate things".