The danger here is differentiating between "the infrastructure" and "the product". Useful database and/or infrastructure work _is_ "building the product".
There's nothing necessarily wrong with using pre-baked or hosted components when they fit the bill, but pretending like they're unrelated concerns is going down a bad road. A lot of recent fads are based on this self-centered, lazy fantasy from devs that $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_MONTH is the only thing that matters and it's a dark, sad situation.
There's a pretty consistent inverse relationship between technical quality and popularity because time and money spent on technical/engineering resources is time and money not spent on marketing and sales resources that bring cash in the door.
Ever wonder why, with a few exceptions, it never seems that the products everyone knows about are comparable to what you can find after a little bit of research online? This is why. The people who are building good stuff are spending the time and resources on building good stuff, whereas the people who aren't are spending the time and resources on making sure they're the path of least resistance.
So in that sense, yes, you are right. It is dumb to spend any time or money on anything other than the bare minimum skeleton needed to allow your sales people to start pimping your stuff.
Whether or not people recognize your product's superiority is more or less irrelevant, because first, they won't, and because second, the extra effort it takes to swim upstream and use your product instead of the mainstream solution won't really be worth the gains for most people no matter how much better it is. You can probably rattle 15 examples of software off the top of your head that is just like this. PostgreSQL is actually a great example of it.
Amazon has run amok feeding people who don't really deserve the title "developer" a load of crap about how you can click buttons in their wizards and be like a super-real grown-up coder-hero without any having to learn any of that outdated command line mumbo-jumbo. It's 2017 after all! Don't worry about that gobbligook hocus-pocus that the smelly old man in the network closet keeps muttering under his breath. That's for smelly old people and third-party Amazon contractors. You have Very Important JavaScript to write, just as soon as you finish dragging Legos--err--"Mega-Elastic Dynamo-tastic Sumerian-Beanstalkinator Units" around on AWS.
How have other professions handled this issue? After all, most people wouldn't know the difference between a safe bridge and an unsafe one, and most people wouldn't know the difference between safely-prepared food and unsafely-prepared food (until they've already eaten it). The profit incentive is to put the bare minimum in place and then sell sell sell.
We may not like the heavy hand of regulation that will clamp down on the software industry, permanently and officially gate it behind the blood-sucking ivory tower of the academic priesthood, and strip it of all vitality and creativity, but with the attitudes that have become prevalent over the last few years, we have no one to blame but ourselves.