One aspect of that is the box in the closet is (in my experience anyway) either up or down. It fails more often, but it fails simpler.

In the cloud, even very small scale apps can run into weird situations like the app server is up, the database is down, and the cache is responding about 50% of the time.

If you don't account for that from the beginning, it can lead to your app displaying some bizarre stuff to users.

I haven't run a server locally in 13 years but I can see why some people would miss it.

I've worked in companies that had everything on prem and cloud companies. There are many nice things about cloud, but reliability is not one of them. Everything is a lot simpler on prem and fails a lot less in my experience. The downside being that scaling is harder. And it can be more expensive, depending on your size.

Right? I can pay extra to have two ISPs for upstream connection, but I have no idea how I'd get a second, totally redundant power connection to the closet in my basement. A UPS with a battery's only going to last so long, so is generator fuel.