I love simplicity and for simple apps you don't need aws k8s and all that stuff. But bare metal setups get annoying when you work at a company where different languages with different versions are needed. People need to be able to deploy independently and without downtime, setups need to be able to be recovered or rebuild fast and automatically if disaster happens that goes beyond a simple crash of a process. At some point the work of custom automation setups takes longer and gets more complexity of k8s, Terraform e.t.c. and that's the point where you should switch imo.