> infra is competing with potentially cheaper

For example? The managed or cloud or... solutions are normally magnitudes more expensive than in house. PaaS are the closest in cost, due to the admin savings etc. but even there, we know current prices are investor funded to gain share.

At the far end, compare what you can get for $150/month at Hetzner vs. AWS. At real scale, paying for an infra team to run it will save a lot of money (and I've yet to see a fully managed solution which doesn't have a team of YAMLers anyway.)