When you give up control of the infrastructure you also give up the ability to decide what's right and wrong.
If you want to work with something that allows you retain that control but still have the convenience of a nice deployment workflow check out my profile.
I think the difference is automation, or rather lack of it. You build personal relationships with real people. Senior network engineers at the supplier don't consider it beneath them to ring up similarly competent people at the customer and chat directly.
In the past I've hosted kit on a larger scale for my businesses, but it seems you get the same personal experience as a tiny individual customer. Even with just a couple of racks of kit of for hobby projects and friends' stuff, I know the network engineers at the DC and transit providers and can email or call direct to discuss things when I need to.
More importantly, if (for example) one of my friends starts gobbling 10Gbps of $$$ transit because of a typo in a script, they ring my mobile to chuckle about it while we fix in realtime, rather than some automated process pulling the plug with the real engineers hiding behind support tickets and first-line support staff that can't string a sentence together.
In life it's always going to be a balance of what's feasible that you can do to keep control and giving up control because something is not feasible.
In this case obviously the author is having a problem high up the stack. The best solution would be to have more control in order to keep his business going.