For what you're discussing, then a VPS/shared/dedicated VM host is more than appropriate. But generally, when companies are going bare metal, they are not doing so for hours at a time.
So the question still remains, what is the use case for an hourly billed bare metal server?
The clients of ours that leverage the by-the-hour model generally use the same devops tools (Terraform, Docker Machine, Ansible, etc) against our API to provision and orchestrate bare metal that they would against AWS or DO to do the same with VM's.
The use case drivers for those who choose bare metal often seem to be price/performance ratios, network, bring your own hypervisor or not use one, etc.
But why was that? I'd say it was a problem with the supply rather than with the demand - bare metal providers didn't offer programmable, on-demand machines, and so the type of customers self-selected against those who were looking for those features.