Personally I have seen a massive surge of interest in running on bare metal again. Largely due to AI workloads, wanting to own GPUs and run them on Infiniband or RoCE fabrics.
Hopefully this trend out-lives AI hype bubble. I much prefer real hardware, a whole bunch of problems are made easier by "Dell will sell me a box with 1TB of RAM for $reasonable". Same goes for effectively lossless data centre networking at 200gbps+, actual BGP, etc.