The magic that is opex compared to capex. I'm sure it makes sense to some bean counter somewhere in the company, but for us who manage the resources it's always a loss.
I'm not sure that's an accurate read. Broadcom changed the calculation by raking capex customers over the coals. Doesn't matter if you own the hardware and lease the data center space if your virtualization stack increases their prices by 1000% with a year notice. They would effectively make companies pay higher than cloud tier premiums for just maintaining their existing services running on VMWare.
I think that it boils down to that opex is considered speedy, flexible and agile. Whereas capex reflects slow/glacial but also stable.
This is also why lease exists, why we have freelance contracts vs employee contracts for indeterminate amounts of time.