Exactly this. It is culture and organisation (structure) dependent. I'm in the throes of the same discussion with my leader ship team, some of whom have built themselves an ops/qa/etc. empire and want to keep their moat.

Are you running a well understood and predictable (as in, little change, growth, nor feature additions) system? Are your developers handing over to central platform/infra/ops teams? You'll probably save some cash by buying and owning the hardware you need for your use case(s). Elasticity is (probably) not part of your vocabulary, perhaps outside of "I wish we had it" anyway.

Have you got teams and/or products that are scaling rapidly or unpredictably? Have you still got a lot of learning and experimenting to do with how your stack will work? Do you need flexibility but can't wait for that flexibility? Then cloud is for you.

n.b. I don't think I've ever felt more validated by a post/comment than yours.