I think there's tremendous value still in GAE. To this day the fact that a company the size of Snapchat is able to operate on a PaaS, with virtually no ops people, is STILL a game-changer. The fact that it's still true 3+ years in is equally as impressive.

The narrative shifted away from PaaS for a number of reasons, but the value prop is still present.

(Disclaimer: work on BigQuery, a DBaaS, which is, in my opinion, is clearly the future)