Anecdotal - but I once worked for a company where the product line I built for them after acquisition was delayed by 5 months because that's how long it took to get the hardware ordered and installed in the datacenter. Getting it up on AWS would have been a days work, maybe two.
Yes, it is death by 1000 cuts. Speccing, negotiating with hardware vendors, data center selection and negotiating, DC engineer/remote hands, managing security cage access, designing your network, network gear, IP address ranges, BGP, secure remote console access, cables, shipping, negotiating with bandwidth providers (multiple, for redundancy), redundant hardware, redundant power sources, UPS. And then you get to plug your server in. Now duplicate other stuff your cloud might provide, like offsite backups, recovery procedures, HA storage, geographic redundancy. And do it again when you outgrown your initial DC. Or build your own DC (power, climate, fire protection, security, fiber, flooring, racks)
Much of this is still required in cloud. Also, I think you're missing the middle ground where 99.99% of companies could happily exist indefinitely: colo. It makes little to no financial or practical sense for most to run their own data centers.
