The learning curve is definitely different but once that's done, the maintenance is minimal (modern hardware is surprisingly reliable from my experience). Most maintenance you'll be doing is software-level stuff (system updates, etc) you'd also need on a cloud-hosted EC2 or similar.

Security updates are automatic. I haven’t touched my physical servers (not even via ssh) in 6 months. The only reason I did it then was that we moved an app from Node to Go, so I was able to completely remove Node from those servers (which felt great). I think people overestimate how hard it is to run a server.

Fair enough. So far it's been under an hour or two a month! We'll see how that pans out in the longer term.

It likely is under that threshold.

Also it doesn't matter. Cloud vs vps/colo/rented bare metal basically comes down to surplus of cash vs surplus of tech talent.

Any small tech focused company is gonna have more of the latter then the former, and in that situation, cloud doesn't make sense when ansible, k8s, and the like exists.