Went through a similar phase,

I think a mix of 2. and 3. is good for a small team or solo dev. Im throwing in a bit of homelab as well by adding some action runners and models on my desktop as well.

But cloudflare is great value for small teams. Not sure how it as at higher scale.

On the topic of env and config. It took me a while to get this write, and maybe overengineered.

But I invested a lot of time in trying to standardize env definitions, secrets manager, and per env config definition defined in my nx projects, and consumed by the commands or deployers. As well as pulumi for IaC.

I tried a couple of different approaches, but finally I just decided to use typescript as my config language. I use nx project.json but defined using typescript. And just define the env config as typescript functions to be injected to each command or deployment as a pure function of target env.