“Weeks of reading AWS documentation will save you hours of learning about infrastructure”

the topic is here is ease of use.

Comparing Heroku to VMs and correctly configured ASGs is fine for me as a sysadmin, but they’re not targeting the same simplicity.

Yep, and if you know enough to set that up, you probably don't need Dokku.

An ASG isn’t nearly as difficult as setting up, securing, and running dokku. There’s even examples and such for setting up the ASG. If you get stuck, all accounts have free support and stack overflow is a few clicks away. The idea that one needs to switch to dokku to avoid setting up ASGs is just silly.

My suggestion was the opposite: don't use Dokku, because you probably don't need it if you're capable of dinking around with AWS.