I'm old and was self hosting 20 years ago, but we're comparing apples to oranges a bit here!

Using AWS for smaller personal projects will always be more expensive and probably less fun.

On the other hand I recently had to run an ML model over hundreds of thousands of media files. I used AWS to launch 100s of GPUs using spot instances and complete the job in a few hours, then just turned it all off and moved on. It cost a few hundred dollars total.

In my mind it's at this kind of scale AWS really makes sense.