If I sell you a loaf of bread and you complain that it's not a sandwich, is it anything else?
> Many (all?) of these services tightly couple you to Amazon, so avoiding them is a very reasonable decision.
That's just a cop-out: checking the “multi-AZ” box in RDS completely avoided this problem with zero lock-in. If you're deploying containers, you have multiple options which are portable and avoid this completely. If you're deploying EC2 instances, again you have options with very limited lock-in (e.g. auto-scaling with multiple AZs).
More importantly, that's also a business decision: if you're that worried about lock-in you are accepting responsibility to operate the alternatives. For example, following industry-standard practice might suggest that you run everything in Kubernetes in multiple AZs, regions, or providers but it would never support running everything in a single AZ.
So that's it, blame the user and caveat emptor?
> not to mention avoiding use of the services which have HA built-in.
Many (all?) of these services tightly couple you to Amazon, so avoiding them is a very reasonable decision.