Well there's still an advantage to that flexibility. Sure it's fun for a random project to have average value to every specs, but some project require much more RAM than CPU, or much more bandwidth, or the more usual much more storage. If you need any big amount of storage on Digital Ocean, you need to take one of their beefy machine, even if you don't need that much RAM or that much CPU. Sure there is object storage, but that's a whole different storage system and it doesn't play well with a database server.
When you actually need specific specs at a huge scale, it's not much more complex to do it over AWS.
for a database server (or for anything that just needs a big filesystem), DO has block storage, which just looks like an attached hard disk. Works fine with a small VM.
they also have memory-optimized or cpu-optimized VM choices.
I'd argue that buying the beefy machine at DigitalOcean would still cost far less than AWS. And you'd be getting on with your life versus banging your head on AWS for the day, week, or year.
When you actually need specific specs at a huge scale, it's not much more complex to do it over AWS.