Beyond a certain scale, sure. But at small scale, you can completely avoid hiring an ops team, or hire a much smaller one, which can more than offset the cloud provider price premium.

My current company works in a niche market with a smallish number of large customers, so our scaling needs are modest. Our total AWS bill is about a third the annual salary of a single ops person.

There's gotta be a very long tail of companies like mine for whom outsourcing to cloud vendors is cheaper than self-hosting.

Depends on the industry and barrier of entry. If your in one with alot of compliance overheads your are outsourcing alot more them compute and storage to your cloud provider. Hiring inhouse in that same case its extremely expensive unless you are over a certain size.

This article seems written by someone who gets excited by shiney objects / hype trains.

What if someone's else profit is due to economies of scale?

With like 40-50% margins too.