Working on a consumer SaaS startup and I strongly disagree. A virtual machine on something like DigitalOcean does not provide any of the nice abstractions that something like a Google Cloud Run (or similar on AWS/Azure) provides. The amount of time a cloud provider can save you administratively is difficult to exaggerate. That is from day 1. Should your startup succeed, and you need to scale, the real savings start to kick in since scaling to a large degree is handled for you. Good luck re-architecting your app into a kubernetes cluster and handling load balancing manually while your competition gets all that with almost no effort.
I've worked on so many small teams where dealing with AWS/Azure etc was a huge part of their day, for very very simple products.
I still remember arguing about bloating a web app with a 1mb package from AWS so it could use their serverless authentication offering.
Common theme as using those lambda function - sometimes paying quite a lot of them - to serve requests that would be twice as fast on the proverbial $5 linux instance.
So yeah, looking from the sidelines it feels like a huge amount of added complexity for small teams, "just in case" they need to scale. Which given how fast modern hardware is way further off than they think.
(unless they use lambda functions for every API request. in which case they better learn to scale in a hurry)
