> Hire one person to buy, configure, manage hardware is what?

This point gets raised every single time bare-metal comes up for discussion and at this point I'm not sure if people are legitimately unaware or if there are hidden agendas at play.

There are plenty of providers out there who will handle the logistics for you with an interface similar to AWS EC2 - ask for server and get SSH access in minutes/days/weeks (depending if it's an off-the-shelf or custom build).

From there, your existing DevOps guy (which you must have to navigate AWS' complexity) can take over.

It's only at either extremely large scale or very unusual requirements that managing your own hardware makes sense. Until then, you will never be able to beat the economies of scale of managed bare-metal providers.