Not my experience at all. The DX is different, but not bad in my, and it has been extremely reliable and inexpensive for my use cases and workloads. I built mainstream stuff and a global multi-region replicated DDB table with backups is essentially free.

That said, I don’t do query time aggregation anymore, which seems to be a common challenge folks hit. Other approaches that implement streaming/incremental aggregation and make it look roughly like query time probably are simpler.