> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […]

This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again?

It's worse this time, in that the old shared hosting environments (e.g. Apache with FastCGI and suexec, or nginx with fpm) were open source, and there were countless shared hosts. The new generation of multi-tenant isolate-based JS runtimes are proprietary, and AFAIK one can count the number of hosts on one hand.