In our case, I mostly agree - we however were led to believe we had network redundancy and when they added new servers and it effectively blacked out access to all servers we realized this was not the case. My realization at the time was simple. It's better to be on a ship with a lot of engineers dedicating their time to a bigger system then hoping an engineer finds the time to check on your one off raft managed solution.

Public clouds are an efficiency gain for both the datacenter and the end user. The bottom line to me is more engineers are focused on operating and improving the public cloud than the state of the art managed dedicated racks from 2014.