cloud infrastructure was never the limiting factor.
Having an old school style IT structure was a pain. Maintaining your severs, networking gear if needed, OS updates ... on and on.
For very small teams (maybe not the well funded start ups) that could eat a lot of time and trouble.
It’s true that it would take a couple weeks to order all the hardware and a couple more to install and configure it, but that’s about the same amount of time you spend writing all the terraform and Kubernetes scripts and configuring cloudformation and VPCs and IAMs.