On the other other hand, the total number of programmers has increased dramatically compared to 20 years ago notwithstanding those improvements.

If I had the choice to be the child of an experienced developer vs not.. I'd want to go as fast as possible and not have to relearn things myself the slow way.

Why "on the other hand"? That the number of programmer increased is just to show that the industry changed and is now incredibly bigger.

True but you can roll your own infrastructure for much less than it cost 20 years ago. Smart companies rely on cloud up to a tipping point. Then it becomes more cost effective to put in your own infrastructure. AWS and other cloud providers lure customers in with low costs but they get stuck paying a fortune as they start scaling.

I agree.

At a smaller scale, I love Heroku for prototype apps, and I would absolutely use them for a startup - right up to the point where I'd be paying the equivalent of 1-2 full-time devops engineers. At that point, it becomes worth it to hire them and transition away. AWS has a similar value proposition, but the tipping point is higher; I'd estimate it at around 15-20 FTEs in Amazon charges before it starts to make sense to leave.

Good point. PaaS like heroku, cloudbee or even docker on linode is an order of magnitude simpler to ship than AWS.

I'd rather be the child of an experienced dev than not.

Rolling your own infrastructure is in a lot of ways def easier than rolling your own programming stack today.