Netlify (primarily) takes a git repo containing a program to generate a static site and turns that into a live running website that automatically updates when the generator repo changes. You don't have to think about configuration or security or updates and you don't have to maintain a server.

Ideally this would be a service with the same ergonomics but the outcome isn't a hosted static website but a machine (somewhere in the cloud) running whatever the user wants. "Tedious" tasks like hardening, monitoring and upgrading (and redeploys) would be handled by the service provider, as opposed to the user.

For people who like doing ops this might not sound appealing but developers (especially single devs and small teams) often just wanna focus on their app, not their ops, even more so when it comes to continous maintenance.

Addendum: I think Laravel has some of this covered in their ecosystem with tools like Forge and Envoyer. But I've never tried any of them so I can't judge.