100% spot on. You can tell this is written by an IC engineer and not a manager/director who would be well aware of the resource costs of doing all of the manual install/configuration work outlined in the article.
At the very small scale when trying to start something, do what you're comfortable with, because whatever you're not is likely to cost you time.
Above that, it's down to what your margins are like, and how large a part the hosting is, but it's rare for cloud to be the cheaper option. Certainly not at list prices - while you're small enough to pay list prices you're being screwed over massively.
> how much of a commodity the skill set to set up and manage non-cloud setups is.
So many little teams actually managing non-cloud setups
"Commodity" ? Not here
The same problem of teams lacking ops skills exists in companies doing cloud stuff too - often because they've bought the fiction that cloud doesn't need devops.