DigitalOcean App Platform

I'm not an AWS expert by no means, but from what I've played around with it it's miles away from something like Heroku where you just have a two-line config file in your Github repo, you point Heroku to the repo and say "deploy whenever there's a commit that passed the CI/CD pipeline).

Or from this here DO innovation either.

Yes, this is what I was referring to when I said EB sometimes seems like a neglected stepchild of AWS.

AWS in general follows a paradigm where the target market is generally large, huge enterprises with niche use cases and large IT organizations that don't mind (and often require) taking fine-grained control of things like setting up CI/CD pipelines, deployment configurations, etc. These things are all possible and powerful on AWS but they mostly require self-configuration, which is sort of the opposite of what Heroku/DO App Platform are trying to be.

Beanstalk is in a weird place because it still follows that AWS paradigm of "we want to expose all of these fine-grained controls to the power users at large enterprises" while also still attempting to make it easier for the average developer. The end result is that Beanstalk gets stuck somewhere in the middle.

Beanstalk is a very capable and powerful service, and you certainly can set up a CI/CD pipeline in the way you've described, but you have to set it up yourself using AWS CodePipeline or by using the beanstalk CLI... which is certainly not as developer friendly as something like Heroku, especially if it's just a hobby app that you're toying with on the weekends.

And to muddy the waters a bit more, AWS also has Amplify, which actually does have one-click-setup for a GitHub linked CI/CD pipeline, but AFAIK it's mostly meant for static websites or for mobile apps, so it isn't exactly the same target use cases as Beanstalk.