I think we've gone a little nuts defining "production system" these days

One thing that AWS, Google and Azure do that your own systems don't is release their updates whenever it suits them, often taking down your business down in the middle of the day with their own problems. You can't fix it, you can't rollback what you just did and get back up and running you just have to sit and wait. That is quite different to a business that turns off its boxes for an hour at 0100 Sunday morning to do updates and release new software. The downtime isn't equivalent because it really matters when it is and if that hurts your use case or not. Your own system might be down for more hours a year than AWS, but its not down Monday to Friday on an evening when you do most your sales because you refuse to touch anything during that period and do all the work outside that and schedule your updates.

I agree. "production system" isn't a useful term without context. Either it's production system in the context of "it's a business serving customers", in which case, there are many homelabs out there which have received paying traffic, or it's a production system in terms of functionality, downtime, technical features etc. Again, there are many homelabs out there that can tick all the same technical and performance boxes as "production system". In the context of the original comment I was responding to ("...running and managing numerous DBs, k8s clusters, ci/cd pipelines and stateless container systems is simply impossible with a team of 1-2 people.") you're more evidence for my comment that it's perfectly possible for 1 - 2 people to run a small production system, just as it's possible for 1 nerd to run a medium - large homelab with the same technical features.