"Serverless" is just "server as a service". Horrible misnomer indeed.

My naive take is that serverless is just a movement back to the simplicity of ftp + cgi / php. It all looks very similar, just with a different pricing model, and a different implementation cloud computing vs shared hosting.

In what ways do they look similar?

Not GP, but uploading a single Javascript function to AWS in the form of a zip file is essentially identical to uploading an individual PHP script to a shared host via FTP/SFTP. The workflow around that process (or rather, the lack of workflow) is the same as the process for developing CGI applications in the 90s/early 2000s.

Of course, Serverless also offers elastic scaling and non-HTTP triggers, so that's a point of difference.

For all the talk of elastic scaling, I suspect that a lot of people are enjoying the idea of Serverless at the moment simply because it harks back to an earlier, pre-framework, pre-workflow approach to web development.

The scaling of serverless functions is a pretty major point of difference between them and SFTPing a PHP script to a shared web host. Another difference is isolation of your code from anyone else's code; this can vary widely between shared host vendors but with serverless functions you don't "neighbors" to worry about, in terms of server load or security (their code being exploited or your code being exploited).

Serverless functions seems like a nice addition to sites that are 98% static but need a little server-side code specific to the task.