Sounds expensive
Those tend to be tricky hires on the small end since you tend to want jack-of-all-trades who either demands a premium salary or doesn't exist.
When you have 10 software engineers, having 1 dedicate 10-20% of their time is cheaper than hiring 1-2 FTEs that aren't writing code.
If you can get (and trust they do it right) developers to do AWS or Kubernetes, you should be able to trust them to do conventional Linux sysadmin on a bunch of dedicated boxes.
A full stack/backed dev is more than capable of learning both, but one of those has way more foot guns than the other.
A few years ago I worked at a place that was on AWS ECS and I think I can count on 1 hand the number of times I needed to SSH into a machine each year. Half of those times were SSHing into the singular VM we had that ran a Strong Swan IPsec tunnel to a vendor.
The current place I work we have bastions and EKS. Occasionally, I SSH into a bastion but usually just use Cloudflare Tunnels (they run as k8s pods and the control plane is private so the bastions are helpful for bootstrapping things). Out of that stuff, it's all been converted to immutable infrastructure and gets recreated once a month with the latest AMI. Probably could kill the bastions and run Cloudflare Tunnel agents on Fargate on ECS to eliminate all the o.g. sysadmin work but some people are nostalgic so I gotta wean em off VMs
> burning money in cloud
I suspect there's two reasons why this happens.
One is just the disassociation with opex that seems ever present in the VC model. The other is that many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops and the cost of switching isn't that attractive until they're faced with a dwindling runway and a down round.