> If you and your team are better at taking care of hardware than an entire building full of highly paid engineering specialists

The trade offs aren't quite that simple. Those specialists are necessary because they're building and maintaining infrastructure that's extremely complex since it has a crazy scale and has to be all things to all people. When you're running in-house, your infrastructure is simpler because it's custom tailored to your specific requirements and scale.

There are tradeoffs that make cloud vs local make sense in different contexts and there's no one right answer.

> but also, no you're not.

If you plan to replicate all of AWS I'd agree with you. But if all you need is a handful of servers, you could end up with better uptime doing it in-house just because you don't have all the moving parts that make AWS tick, reducing the chance for something to go wrong.

My bare-metal servers stayed up during both of the recent outages, not because I'm some kind of genius that's better than the AWS engineers but just because it's a dead simple stack that has zero moving parts and my project doesn't require anything more complex.

There is absolutely no reason for a local device (like a door lock or dishwasher as per OP) to depend on any external connectivity. Not to the company on-prem hardware, not to AWS.