Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Most companies are not like Facebook or Dropbox that can maintain an internal IT organization at a high level equivalent to AWS. Let's try this with different phrasing. In 200X a lot of companies were able to maintain their own infrastructure, just like Facebook and Amazon did at the time. Forward 10-13 years. We have cheaper hardware. We have extra 10+ years of development in open-source software. And yet that list…
I worked at a couple of those self-hosted companies in the 200Xs. For me, as a developer, it was painful and way, way, way worse than AWS or GCP. Planning for big expected spikes of traffic was extremely painful, and once the cloud vendors started adding new services we felt continually behind the times. I can only think it was "interesting" if you've forgotten how difficult and expensive managing your own infrastruc…
So, there were a lot of, and still there a lot of corporations running their own stuff. Some of these are still running their own stuff well. Some got big, some stayed small in the past decade (some downsized).
It's not necessarily hard to run your own stuff either.
Of course, of course, managed platforms are easy (or easier) from a lot of aspects. (That's their value offering after all.) And the IT expertise market was never exceptionally great in a lot of places. Meaning it was hard to find good sysadmins, good ops people, good devops folks, good programmers, leads, tech PMs, POs, etc. who were able to work together and effectively run their shit, build their product/service, run with the flow (of open source or whatever vendor they used), and so on.
AWS/GCP/Azure is a big paradigm change. No longer do you need to argue about what and how, at best you pick one of the three, and that's it. No longer you need to think about hardware, colo, uplink, switches, peering, multi-homing, picking the right dedicated server provider, and so on. (Sure, you need network guys, who at least have some basic understanding of VPC - overlay networking, but the basics are easy, and the rest is YAGNI anyway.) And this is due to their size. They are big enough, that their price premium - compared even to whatever random small hosting provider you might find on the 'net - is irrelevant, because they are usually more efficient, more secure, more geo-available than the small ones.
But, ... of course, while generalizing all self-hosted companies (meaning that all self-hosted is a pain) leads to a falsehood, on the margin, especially during the IT consolidation of the past years, most companies moved away from self-hosting. And developers usually rejoiced. And similarly, generalizing the problem of self-hosting from your experiences again leads to a flawed conclusion (that it's necessarily hard and expensive to manage your infra), on average, outsourcing a cost-center in an ever increasing complexity world (that is potentially unbounded costs) and focusing on profit-centers is a sane decision.