There is something to that, though these skills are fairly easy to buy. Lots of consultancies like mine offer management of these things on retainer. But a lot of developers have passing knowledge of AWS etc., but none with managed hosting and might well prefer the cloud options for that reasons.
Poorly managed old managed setups also probabl burned a lot of more experienced people. E.g. if you had to fill in stupid forms and request a server weeks ahead, odds are cloud equals freedom in your mind, even though a well run infra setup could offer you to spin up container workloads and leave dealing with adding capacity as a background concern developers don't need to think about.
Personally, I recall well the time I had to call in to Yahoo's hardware review board, chaired by one of the founders (Filo) because the billing system I managed, which handled millions of dollars worth of transactions, needed a new database server - priced around $10k. There were at least a dozen senior people on that call.
If that was your experience of colo/managed servers/on prem, it's not unsurprising if you value cloud services far higher than their costs for the sake of avoiding that bureaucracy.
I'm working on tooling that I hope will change that, by making compute and storage on cheaper managed providers vs. cloud providers fungible commodities, but it's a hard problem.