I'm not so sure it's a zero sum kind of thing. Yes, it seems likely that they are paying at least one full time employee to maintain their production environment. At the same time, AWS isn't without it's complications, there are people who are employed specifically to babysit it.
Sure people need to babysit AWS resources, but those resources still exist and need babysitting. The bare metal approach is purely additive. E.g. if you need someone to babysit EKS, then you also need someone to babysit your bare metal k8s setup, but likely the bare metal k8s setup is even more work.
