I used WinForms actually, with drag and drop in the designer you could very very quickly get basic line of business apps going. You could write apps using this type of "old" outdated tech for a long time (I know most moved on, I didn't).

One thing I've been enjoying recently is slack / zoom bots. It's basically a CLI that is accessible to an entire team. I've found the efficiency fantastic. So for simple line of business needs where a quick winforms app might have worked, something to consider.

I started with some very simple items, and then just kept building. It's immediately usable by staff from an office manager to someone very technical. The deployment story is fantastic -> no one has to do anything. Matches web apps that way. This beats winform apps for me.

You get a front-end without much hassle. If someone doesn't give a command in expected format I do exactly what I'd do with a CLI, give them a help response. It's the command line for non-command line people, and the efficiency is great.

Deployment side moved to AWS RDS (postgresql) for the data store. AWS ECS for the containers. ECS Anywhere for stuff that is heavy compute where AWS can get expensive. Scheduled jobs (ECS again) for data load work, added a freshness indicator to responses to users as additional monitoring. Went from self hosting assets to signed s3 links that expire following asset generation. This is a bit slower then doing a straight http server but again, the maintenance reduction is great.

This is for small in size databases with a perhaps 100M records x 4 tables maybe. Also doing some live lookups / crawl type work based on commands to supplement database, again ECS.

I ended up moving off SimpleDB (old AWS product not offered but they kept it running) to dynamoDB and then to just postgresql for everything. For large data loads despite the flexibility/scalability of dynamo, I just couldn't get it to really deliver and the performance / feature set on postgresql for the price and just being on one datastore worked out far better for me. I don't pretend to be a dynamoDB expert so the big loads are probably something I wasn't doing right

RDS is fantastic in my book, upgrades / backups etc in particular -> I'm a huge fan. I wish AWS would break out revenue by product, that has to be raking in the money along with EC2 / S3 and data transfer.

If you have compute needs, ECS anywhere feels like cheating. Basically, you can take a almost home level AMD Ryzen box with a bunch of ram, get the disto/agent on it, and try your jobs there first. Makes you realize how much we give up in the cloud in terms of cost/unit compute. If box is offline, you can fall back to ECS. Not sure exactly why they offered this product -> it saves a ton.

Anyways, that one solution that has been rock solid stable, easy to deploy, and covers a surprising amount of ground and user picked it up quickly.
You also get authentication pretty much built in as well.

The hackers here obviously call this "laughable", but I'd encourage folks tired of all the layers of crap to give it a try, just start scratching small user itches - the usage I've seen has been fantastic with no push.

BTW, the interface feels fast to users because they are just typing, don't have to login or go anywhere etc.