I tell you that ECS has eliminated a ton of extra work for my team for a bargain price, and your response is "but you still have to do x, y, and z!" It's like saying that I shouldn't buy a dishwasher because I'd still have to wash the pots.

Yes, we still need to do some sysadmin-y tasks. But ECS handles so many of them that we actually have the time, energy, and knowledge to take care of the few that remain.

(As an aside, keeping language and OS versions up to date becomes a development task rather than an ops task when running Docker + ECS. We increment a version number in the repository and test everything, the same as we do for any library or framework that we depend on.)