OP here, I agree. You can get super far with a service like fly.io/Heroku/Netlify/Vercel etc. (pick the one that works with your stack). VMs are an anti-pattern as well for the early stages of an application or startup.
I find those solutions end up being harder once you have to integrate something new you didn't know you needed. And the cost, at least for something like Heroku, is MORE than using something like GKE where I don't need a new dyno for every service. I consider GKE (and DO's and AWS's equivalent k8s solutions) on the same platform level as a fly.io/Heroku/etc.
