I've decided never to use AWS for personal projects, it's just not worth it. Happily sitting on my Hetzner $5/month VPS that's running multiple services and DBs.
How do you learn new stuff? Because not everywhere you can have time for learning and sit in front of Udemy course.
Hmm not sure I understand the question/point. You'd have spent more time trying a new technology than if you read blog posts / listened to podcasts created by people who've used it extensively. You also wouldn't learn much about the legitimate tradeoffs either, because you just won't observe them in pet projects - eg how managed DBs are worth it despite the costs, how multiple standalone Lambdas are a pain to handle when it comes to CI/CD, testing, security updates, etc.