This is not surprising. It's kind of obvious that cloud costs will scale more dramatically than any other cost center. So it's really an attractive idea to think that you can cut your largest bill by going on-prem.

The problem with going on-prem is that for most companies this is so complex and hard to operationalize that they will likely just fail at that attempt.

Cloud biggest contribution besides seamless infrastructure access, is the way it has lower the overall technical competency threshold to operate an internet business. It's really easier to find someone that knows AWS or Azure than is to find that someone who knows how to build on-prem infrastructure.

I imagine that repatriation for the average large cloud business will only be possible for those who are already operating in modern infrastructure constructs like Kubernetes.

If you have critical workflows build on propietary cloud services, you're probably fucked. You will have to rebuild every single service from scratch and make it scalable out of the box. If you're a multi-dimensional business that sounds like a nightmare.

I honestly think that Dropbox was capable of doing it just because the nature of their business.

At the primitive level you're mostly replacing your storage vendor. It happens to be that storage is their business model so it's quite evident that repatriating that critical piece of your business will yield great gains. I don't think it's that simple for other cloud businesses.