I would argue that Heroku is still the fastest way to get a web app deployed for the first time. One command to push and one click to setup a solid database.

As your systems get more complex, you can still peel off services to AWS or the like, but until then, Heroku combines the following tasks and AWS services into a dead simple process: configuring instances, Scaling Groups, RDS, Cloudwatch (some metrics, consolidated logging) and ELB.

Heroku has cheap, easy, and performant hosting that is ideal for prototyping and scaling out an early stage company. It gets more expensive as you get "big" and it seems most of the posts as of late related to databases, scaling, and containerization have focused on building for "big". Heroku "just works" and while that is fantastic for many, the interesting stuff that hits the front page is often the "cooler" stuff that takes a lot more engineering to roll out. I think Heroku and PaaS tools in general have become the new "normal" and people rarely discuss "normal" on a news site. ( Just my observations over the years )