I disagree that it's the only reality. Definitely there is a scale where paying a sysadmin makes more sense than paying a provider for their sysadmin skills.

There is another situation, which I would argue is the "enterprise" situation, where you will want to pay your programmers to make the changes because they're fixed overhead rather than capital expenditures. This scenario comes because of an internal push to save money (adding significant capacity costs too much), or because adding any sort of capacity increases operational complexity more than it increases code complexity. It's a much larger scale than where TestingBot is at, but a problem they probably hope to encounter one day.