I have to admit a certain personal bias coming into this, but honestly it's not hard to see how so much of this conversation is being driven by particular hosti

I have to admit a certain personal bias coming into this, but honestly it's not hard to see how so much of this conversation is being driven by particular hosting companies and their pet frameworks trying to capture marketshare. IMHO: Most web projects don't need to be run "right on the edge". Most web projects don't need to contort themselves to fit into the category of "serverless functions" and all the limitations therein (and the edge compute platforms are even more constrained!). Many articles, like this one, completely gloss over the wonderful category that is "managed platforms which still give you real VMs". Take Render for example. (And platforms like Heroku before that.) I certainly don't need to deal with the headaches of upgrading OS versions or applying security updates or doing a ton of manual setup any time I need to scale to more servers. Render does that all for me automatically, or at the click of a button. Yet at the end of the day, I'm just writing regular server code to deploy onto "regular" Unix-y environments which are fairly similar to what I develop on at home. Pretty awesome stuff. Do I care that it's not all running "on the edge"? Nope. So while it's "cool" that we have things like edge compute as an option, I think the whiz-bang-ness of it all is being wildly oversold. Industry-wide, I want to see managed VM platforms like Render (and even lower-level platforms like, say, Fly) take the lead in people's minds rather than edge compute which is far more limited and—most damning—JavaScript-centric.