I'm with you, but for me Cloud does have one major benefit:

If you use it as IaaS, it's a lot quicker to get prototypes working than if you use anything else, including VPS's from other providers.

Google Cloud in particular has very few vectors for lock-in, and follows more principle of least surprise.

But once you have prototyped, you should ask the question about rebuilding it somewhere that is cheaper.

Near infinite scalability of disk drives is nice, and snapshotting, and cloud in general can allow you to extend your prototype into taking production load and allowing you to measure what you will need; but leaning in to "cloud magick" (cloud run, lambdas, etc) will consume almost as much time to learn and debug as just doing it the old school way anyway. In my lived experience.