But even if you were to stick to something simple, say, object storage. A bucket or blob store has no SAN config, no webserver config, no switches, no gateways, no raid controllers, no striping, mirroring, parity configuration, no firmware, no BIOS, no BMC, no OS. None of that. It's all eliminated. All that remains is the top layer where you configure your cost-to-resilience ratio and your access policy. And yes, you could cut corners, but those are orders of magnitude fewer corners you could be cutting than if you include all the stuff below it.
Add to that: almost all of it has good APIs that are well defined, well supported and have an ecosystem to go with it. Try finding anything like that for a crappy NetApp or EMC appliance you find in a datacenter. It either doesn't exist, or it's so bad you might as well run MinIO or a bloody NFS share (not actual object storage) yourself.
Being bad at cloud is definitely more expensive than being bad at on-prem, I'll give you that. But with cloud, at least you get a bill that you can use to show your peers and higher ups that being bad has a cost. Internal virtual/amortised dollars are much harder to allocate to incompetence. It's often completely ignored, and at best revisited at periodic capacity planning reviews with few to no consequences.
The only place on-prem has, is with locality requirements. That includes latency sensitive things where sub 1ms is a goal, and air gapped things. But even in the first case things like an AWS Outpost exist, and those are cheaper than doing it yourself (not much, but enough to save on the hardware and on 2 FTEs).
