ECS is worth a mention

>it seemed like a world of down to earth implementations that might be clunky in some ways but were focused on comprehensible goals

For most people it still is. People that just run things normally, the way they always have, just carry on as normal. You don't hear from them because there's nothing to blog about it. It's business as normal. People think that kubernetes and docker and that whole "ecosystem" is far more prevalent than it really is, because when you use such overcomplicated enterpriseware you inevitably have issues and they get talked about. There's just nothing to blog about when it comes to just running a few servers with nginx reverse proxying some internet daemon. It Just Works.