As it approaches its first anniversary, Strapi Cloud has significantly evolved and proven its robustness with an excellent track record of stability.
The prices are still too high; I would rather self-host.
That is why I love Strapi, you have options. I have self hosted projects as well, after adding all the cost I am paying about 50 bucks per month. This includes email, file storage, DB and hosting the project. But I still had to go through the process of setting it all up.
I recently, set up a project using Strapi dev tear to save time, in my case, spending less time on setting up stuff my self make sense to me.
I may be biased, cause I work at the company. But in my mind, I think about connivance vs time I would have to spend.
But you do have to decide if it makes sense based on project requirements. If I have a client, and want to make there life easier, I would just set up a Strapi Cloud account and pass on the cost as part of the billing.
And for projects that are not big enough to justify paying for hosting, I would either do local dev, or self host via DO or Render.