> All the pro-cloud talking points... don't persuade anyone with any real technical understanding

This is a very engineer-centric take. The cloud has some big advantages that are entirely non-technical:

- You don't need to pay for hardware upfront. This is critical for many early-stage startups, who have no real ability to predict CapEx until they find product/market fit.

- You have someone else to point the SOC2/HIPAA/etc auditors at. For anyone launching a company in a regulated space, being able to checkbox your entire infrastructure based on AWS/Azure/etc existing certifications is huge.