Yeah that does work (which I have managed to pull off)... but I feel like it's a bit more of a pain (very slightly) to change the metadata, open up the ports and whatnot to ssh. I think AWS just tells you to download a .pem file and ssh.

In conclusion, I guess both ways aren't bad. I just seem to prefer AWS here because for me it was a bit easier than GCP because I ran into several problems when sshing to GCP initially.