True, it can't compete with AWS/GCP/Azure if you're large scale. But most of us are not large scale, we just need a no frills experience instead of dealing with 27 nested panels just to spin up a VM.
I don’t think it’s impossible for them to survive. Salesforce bought them more than 10 years ago and did little to support growth of Heroku. And yet they’re still around and people still ask „is there something new with comparable customer experience?” because they don’t mind paying more
DO has always been a bit rich for my blood though, and even a low cost hetzner VPS has less cores than I remember seeing at the same price a decade ago. I could be wrong there though I usually use Vultr for their SYD region.
Less cores but probably 5x more performance per core now.
There are many different configurations of vps available with different numbers of cores, if you are picking the vps configuration specifically to have more cores than some transcoding software uses by default to avoid configuring a thread limit for that software then you are still configuring things to the nth degree just at the objectively wrong level of abstraction.