Valid point, and for a personal project that's exactly the right call. Texlaunch is different, though. It's not one app running in Docker. It's a platform that will run other people's apps. So now your VPS needs to spin up isolated containers per user on demand, provision a TLS subdomain in seconds per deployment, auto-detect runtimes without a Dockerfile, scale build jobs without blocking other users, and handle a container crashing without taking the host down.
You can absolutely build that on a VPS, but at that point, you're not just using Docker, you're rebuilding ECS, CodeBuild, and ACM from scratch. AWS already solved those problems. I'd rather ship features. That's why I went with AWS.