Netflix, I agree. But what about Tinder, Reddit, Yelp, and Foursquare makes them unsuited to a PaaS? Is this, "It's not fast enough for my EXTREME METAL CLOSENESS?" arguments? Scaling them isn't inherently made easier by AWS. People said the same shit about AWS as opposed to your own data center.
The nice part about Google's approach, it gives you both worlds in an interoperable package. But I suppose you're more interested in the silverbacking than the specific technical arguments.
> There are systems that need AWS's model, but they're for specialist products.
Netflix. Tinder. Reddit. Yelp. Slack. Foursquare.
AWS' model works absolutely fine if you have systems knowledge. If you're looking for a PaaS, its of course not the solution for you. It feels like your comment is "Why doesn't AWS do what it wasn't designed for?"