I work in a large company.

The problem is not the first time setup. The problem is essentially what “uptime” you can provide. Once you setup an infrastructure many people come to depend on it.

Lets say two teams lose half a day when that CI/CD mac mini goes down then paying for a cloud provider to manage many instances and “sharing them ondemand” makes a lot of monetary sense.

Of course, paying a cloud provider may or may not make sense for hobbyists. Personally, I pay for cloud storage - thats super hard to get right.