@quixoticgeek @mwl Guy runs a hosting startup, so I'm not surprised. This sort of 'advice' has been going around in startup circles for a very, very long time, unfortunately...
The people giving this advice also invariably have extremely limited (and often no) experience with self-hosting things, and systematically overestimate the difficulty of Linux administration tasks, and *underestimate* the difficulty of interacting with SaaS/PaaS APIs and dashboards.
It's like the people arguing "AWS makes hosting so much simpler than running your own servers" and then hiring specialized "AWS engineers", ie. sysadmins who can only work with vendor-specific systems...
@quixoticgeek @mwl (I think I've argued with literal hundreds of these people on the startup side of the Node.js world by now, so these conclusions are not based on a small sample size either)