Thanks for your input! This seems super cool! Have you considered heroku and alike? Or you just stick to DO for the additional remote compute that you use?
I like that my VPS is just a generic Linux box, and not a PaaS. If DigitalOcean doesn't work, I can redeploy anywhere else in a few minutes.
I also find this a lot easier to reason about than a bunch of scattered services talking to each other through APIs. In the end, it's just docker plus a bunch of scripts.