I don't agree life sucked before PaaS. I've been responsible for responding to far too many production issues where the PaaS tooling got in the way of rapid response.
PaaS is a problem for me because so many developers don't understand (or own) the tradeoffs of choosing PaaS, so i have to constantly have the "no-PaaS" argument to people who have never dealt with the responsibility of uptime response and can't fathom why I'd want to "do more work when the PaaS does it for you"
I think if you start a new project, PaaS is definitely the way to go. You don't have that many infra people available, you don't have time to deal with building your own deployment details, etc. Once you have time, staff, and real users - move from PaaS to something you can prove is both a better fit and more reliable than (for example) Heroku.
But in the meantime? PaaS services solved a lot of issues for you for less money than it would take you to interview a sysops person. Use them as much as you can, whether it's complete app hosting, abstracted container deployment, or something else.
PaaS is a problem for me because so many developers don't understand (or own) the tradeoffs of choosing PaaS, so i have to constantly have the "no-PaaS" argument to people who have never dealt with the responsibility of uptime response and can't fathom why I'd want to "do more work when the PaaS does it for you"