I fully agree with your last paragraph, but not sure what it has to do with cloud infrastructure specifically. AWS also leverages huge economies of scale into profit, it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server in a colo somewhere. You certainly won't realize equivalent availability, scalability, security, support ecosystem, etc with it either. Cloud infra can make a lot of sense even with "pets" - you just gotta make sure to understand requirements, limitations, and use the right tools for the problem. For me personally, I'll reach for cloud infra these days as a reasonable default (similar to reaching for Postgres as a reasonable database default), especially if it's managed and affordable.