Worked enough as preferred partner with all 3 major cloud providers to know that roughly equivalent does not mean equal and efforts are significant. e.g. self-hosted haproxy or nginx is much better than those load balancers as each provider has their own set of API's. So please do not underestimate the efforts.

> If you think this doesn't also apply to your physical racks in datacenters

Self-hosted means more than just datacenters, can be within office or home. So it's not easy to shut. Also there are numerous examples of aws account suspended with all services blocked just based on one sided terms of service not even a legal notice requirement.

As I said earlier most people trade freedom for convenience and that's what cloud service is. Its not freedom but slavery to convenience.

> stick to running instances

What's running is not the question here, but freedom and ownership.

Here its still an issue of who owns the resources and data within those resources. Buried within terms of service and agreement its the cloud provider who is a judge, jury and executioner.

> With a warrant, the authorities will come and take your shit.

It's very hard to get a warrant from a court for a legitimate business to confiscate their resources (bar is just too high) vs a notice via an email to a cloud provider for perceived infringment (indeed most cloud provider have dedicated contacts for government notices and implementation, given they also provide services to government agencies). Also targeting individual self-hosted infrastructure is very costly. Examples you are presenting are just to create FUD, majority of the self-hosted infrastructure in the world is for legitimate purpose and true freedom.