This is the way.

The only places I've worked at/for as of the last 2-3 years that don't heavily rely on managed services were an absolute disaster. A lot of "not invented here" syndrome. A lot of anti-patterns and janky hacks to make things work.

Currently working somewhere 100% locked in to AWS and I've never been happier.

There's a huge gap between "we assume there's a competently run Postgres somewhere" and being vendor-locked to AWS. Former doesn't imply latter.

Nothing wrong with bare metal.

Bare metal has higher fixed costs (mostly people’s comp) and lower marginal unit costs (per GB RAM, per TB, per CPU-second).

I think at small scale, I’d put nearly everything natively in the cloud (including every side project that has a network-connected, always on component). At extreme scale, most things should be bare metal. There’s a crossover point somewhere in the middle. For me, that crossover point is somewhere in the huge scale range.

Non-cloud pattern and 2008 are both unqualified issues.

That said, RDS is great. Managed, automated backups and portable.