The title is clickbait or maybe simply misguided in my opinion. A cheap VM and Serverless services are very different things and not directly comparable.
But I do sometimes get the impression that the simple approaches are discarded too easily today. You can rent a lot of hardware pretty cheap from Hetzner and the raw power you get is much higher than what you get with cloud services for the same amount of money. Of course the cloud also provides more stuff, but you really pay a hefty price for some of the things you get there (cough traffic).
The difference gets even larger when you look at the Hetzner root servers, that's a lot of CPU, RAM and storage for little money. And renting actual servers does seem to be overlooked a bit at times, often the comparison is between the cloud and actually buying servers and doing everything yourself.
But I do sometimes get the impression that the simple approaches are discarded too easily today. You can rent a lot of hardware pretty cheap from Hetzner and the raw power you get is much higher than what you get with cloud services for the same amount of money. Of course the cloud also provides more stuff, but you really pay a hefty price for some of the things you get there (cough traffic).
The difference gets even larger when you look at the Hetzner root servers, that's a lot of CPU, RAM and storage for little money. And renting actual servers does seem to be overlooked a bit at times, often the comparison is between the cloud and actually buying servers and doing everything yourself.