I'm assuming that this was originally sarcastic, but bare metal can actually turn out really well in some situations. If you're big enough to save just $50k/month by moving from AWS to physical machines, that's several System Engineers you can hire to do your day-to-day ops work and maintenance on your Ansible/whatever scripts.

The thing that's more difficult to do on physical hardware, obviously, is scaling down every day if your peak load is some insane multiple of your base load for a 24h cycle. That's where AWS makes a lot of sense.

I don't think there's an obvious 'best' answer -- it depends on what you need.

It just bugs me that the current state of Ops/Infrastructure sometimes looks so much like the worst parts of the Javascript ecosystem.