Thanks for sharing these experiences. Looked into AWS Amplify as well - but it just seemed like too much dark magic going on for me.

Deploying on ECS should definitely be the easiest. However, that can also be much more expensive than using Vercel.

I had put together a guide a while ago to deploy Next.js on AWS in a Severless way if you are interested that should be much more cost-efficient for low-traffic sites: https://maxrohde.com/2022/01/21/deploy-serverless-next-js-to-aws-with-terraform-1-1