Newer operations approaches may have helped make the state of affairs tractable, but it does not at all argue for that microservice architecture. There was literally no value gained from running a dozen web servers instead of two. And that being the case, the straightforward but "outdated" way of managing one or two servers manually would almost definitely be cheaper than learning and implementing the more modern approach.

If you think everyone who isn't using containers is outdated, you are living in an unrealistic bubble.

I don't think containers are necessary for every use case, but for the described one they definitely are.