> Do [...]
your career [...] a favor, and at least be aware of a few things.
[emphasis mine]Doing your career a favor is how we ended up in this situation in the first place. The tech industry had way too much free money floating around that there was never any market pressure to operate profitably, so complexity increased to fill the available resources.
This has now gone on long enough that there are now entire careers built around the idea that the cloud is the only way - people that spend all day rewriting YAML/Terraform files, or developers turning every single little feature into a complex, failure-prone distributed system because the laptop-grade CPU their code runs on can't do it synchronously in a reasonable amount of time.
All these people, their managers and decision makers could end up out of a job or face inconvenient consequences if the industry were to call out the bullshit collectively, so it's in everyone's best interest to not call it out. I’m sure there are cloud DevOps people that feel the same way but wouldn’t admit it because it’s more lucrative for them to keep pretending.
This works at multiple levels too, as a startup, you wouldn't be considered "cool" and deserving of VC funding (the aforementioned "free money") if you don't build an engineering playground based on laptop-grade CPU performance rented by the minute at 10x+ markup. You wouldn't be considered a "cool" place to work for either if prospective "engineers" or DevOps people can't use this opportunity to put "cloud" on their CVs and brag about solving self-inflicted problems.
Clueless, non-tech companies are affected too - they got suckered into the whole "cloud" idea, and admitting their mistake would be politically inconvenient (and potentially require firing/retraining/losing some employees), so they'd rather continue and pour more money into the dumpster fire.
A reckoning on the cloud and a return to rationality would actually work out well for everyone, including those who have a reason to use it, as it would force them to lower their prices to compete. But as long as everyone is happy to pay their insane markups, why would they not take the money?