EC2 might be a glorified VPS provider, but you seem to be ignoring the vast array of managed services in modern cloud providers (or unaware of their utility beyond padding resumes).

Load balancing, fault tolerance, high availability, arbitrary scale, messaging, orchestration, autoscaling, warehousing, big data processing, identity management, desktop management, secrets management, container registries, source code management, build tools, hardware test suites, gpu hardware, observability tools...

Those of use that use cloud providers know full well why we use them (and certainly know when not to).