I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month.

There are of course benefits to using cloud based VMs and I use them as well. But you are paying a very steep premium for what is a pitiful amount of compute and memory. There's a lot of wiggle room for price decreases and the only thing preventing that is a lack of competition. There's a reason Amazon is so rich: nobody seems to challenge them on AWS pricing. There's value in having them do all the faffing about with hardware of course. That's why companies use them. I'm in GCP; but same principle. I don't want to have to worry about replacing hard disks in the middle of the night, deal with network routers that are misbehaving, cooling issues, etc. That's why I pay them the big bucks. But I'm well aware that it's not that great of a deal.

I used Hetzner a decade ago and paid something like 50 euros per month for a quad core xeon with a raid 1 disks, 32 GB, etc. Bare metal of course. But also, 50 euro. We had five of those. Forget about getting anything close to that with modern cloud providers for anything resembling a reasonable price. Your first monthly bill might actually add up to enough to buy your own hardware. Very tempting. They have beefed up their specs since then. You now get more for less. And they also do VMs now.