The biggest part missing from the opposing side is: Their view is very much rooted in the pre-Cloud hardware infrastructure world, where you'd pay sysadmins a full salary to sit in a dark room to monitor these servers.

The reality nowadays is: the on-prem staff is covered in the colo fees, which is split between everyone coloing in the location and reasonably affordable. The software-level work above that has massively simplified over the past 15 years, and effectively rivals the volume of work it would take to run workloads in the cloud (do you think managing IAM and Terraform is free?)