I dunno the more people dig into this approach they will probably end up just reinventing Kubernetes.
I use k3s/Rancher with Ansible and use dedicated VMs on various providers. Using Flannel with wireguard connects them all together.
This I think is reasonable solution as the main problem with cloud providers is they are just price gouging.
I always feel like I am taking crazy pills when I read these threads. The k8s API and manifests config feels like a create standardardized way to deploy containers. I wouldn't want to run a k8s cluster from scratch but EKS has been pretty straightforward to work with. Being able to use kind locally for testing is amazing and k9s is my new favourite infra monitoring tool.
Even if you just run on 2 nodes with k3s it seems worth it to me for the standardized tooling. Yes, it is not a $5 a month setup but frankly if what you host can be served by a single $5 a month VM I don't particularly care about your insights, they are irrelevant in a work context.