I grew up in an era where running your own servers was just generally accepted practice. It's been fascinating watching how dramatically that viewpoint has shifted over the years to the point where it is now a novel idea to do so.
I worked at a startup that managed its own bare metal. It was very hard and time consuming. And when things went down it was on you. You needed a really good datacenter partner to make sure that they were on top of things and could drop things at a moment's notice. But you don't know how responsive they will be until you're actually experiencing an outage.
The level of convenience that cloud providers give is just orders of magnitude more efficient and easier.