Bad things can happen to it, but at least nobody futzes with it all the time. Most of e.g. Google's major outages (Cloud and Borg) are configuration error or human error. I run my own systems very conservatively. I use conservative technology choices, my kernels are years behind bleeding edge (although I do install security updates, of course), and I don't try to fix or "improve" what's not broken because my paycheck does not depend on that. And in the unlikely event something does get fucked up, I can fix it within less than an hour and I'm the only one affected. It's also extremely unlikely to have any kind of "global" outage.

Don't get me wrong, I use cloud (GCP, if you must know) too, and if my business grew massively, I'd probably use it more. But frankly I'm more satisfied with my own "on prem" solution. Single rack which basically pays for itself every 3 months or so in cloud costs, what's not to like?

I can’t say for sure, but I’m assuming they meant because it is (in comparison) not a distributed (or complex) system.