Alongside a host of other issues ("Don't use CDNs because they increase your complexity" is a wild idea coming from someone advocating bare metal boxes) I think there's a confusion of terms when it comes to "cloud"

I prefer renting virtual private servers from Digital Ocean (or, yes, EC2 instances) and configuring them myself. Doing so is perhaps more involved than buying into the AWS/GCP/Azure ecosystem, but I already know the tools involved, and I value the safeguard against vendor lock-in/buy-in enough to spend more time on them.

Those VPSs are "cloud" solutions in my opinion, and a happy medium between AWS and the author's unnecessarily-profanity-laden proposal that everyone should rent/buy metal. You can be "pro-cloud" and "anti-closed-cloud-ecosystem" at the same time.