My point is that a lot of people don't need all those things. As the article points out, a managed dedicated server offers most of those benefits and the redund

My point is that a lot of people don't need all those things. As the article points out, a managed dedicated server offers most of those benefits and the redundancy plus "easy scaling" of AWS is not even necessary if your goal is just to avoid debugging hardware issues. It's easy to setup a home raspberry pi. It's easy to go one step up and setup a colocated raspberry pi. It's easy to setup a managed dedicated server. Auto scaling virtually provisioned hardware is great for a big company like Netflix with actual daily fluctuating demand. Most people don't need such advanced scaling features. I previously had Sonic.net, which was one of the best fiber offerings for consumers available. 1 gbps up and down, unmetered, and was pretty much never down during the period I had it.