Unpopular opinion: it’s good actually for their to be different solutions that meet different needs.

If you are on AWS and you are not using the (unfortunately named) Copilot CLI[0], you're opting in to the full complexity of AWS. Copilot fortunately makes most common scenarios waaaay easier to build, setup, and deploy including building staged environments following best practices for AWS (separate accounts; I know, in and of itself kind of a pain in the ass).

It encodes the most common types of application backend deployments into simple patterns and makes it pretty easy to build full and deploy full application stacks (Route 53 -> CloudFront -> S3 (static FE) -> ALB + SGs + TGs -> ECS cluster (backend APIs) -> DBs)

With the Copilot CLI, I find the experience on AWS significantly better and in some ways, more well-rounded than on GCP. GCP's Firebase tooling and CLI comes close, but alas, Firebase does not have the same level of extensibility that Copilot offers by allowing you to include both CDK and CloudFormation as extension points which then allows you to use Copilot to manage a good chunk of your AWS infra with a single, easy to use CLI.

For simple apps, I prefer Firebase on GCP. For more complex apps, I think Copilot on AWS is really, really good. One caveat: ECS is much slower to roll nodes over to new versions compared to Cloud Run. Best I could achieve on it was ~180s for a Blue/Green rollover whereas Cloud Run does this in seconds.

TL;DR: if you are not an enterprise and you are on AWS, your life will assuredly be better with Copilot instead of CDK, CloudFormation, or almost any other solution for deploying to AWS.

[0] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/

And all this to build a website that can be run on a single server, and even not a beefy one :). SQLite + Go is arguably even easier to start with and it can get you surprisingly far

complexity = money for AWS. At this point, I am actually scared I will end up misconfiguring something and stare at a 6 figure bill one morning. I'd much rather use other services or spin up my own than have very delicate discussions with pushy AWS sales guys first thing in the morning.

Not surprising in my opinion. It is not hard to setup a VPS with whatever you want to deploy nowadays. 99% of the websites out there don't need to be able to infinity scale and it is way cheaper to host your stuff on a VPS, that doesn't have the risk of exploding in cost the way s3 does.

I think AWS is still better in terms of customer support and help that they provide. You really need to keep an eye on the billing console when starting playing around with AWS, the free tier boundary line is pretty thin. for new accounts they have started to give 6 months free plus also some credits. They are trying their best to make it simpler.