It often seems like presenting the image of being autonomous to our peers seems more important than actually achieving it.
It takes a lot of energy to replicate what AWS and friends have done once we factor in concerns like the passage of time and entropy. I've never been able to keep a media/NAS appliance alive for much longer than 3-4 years. Inevitably, there is some kind of catastrophic event and I have to start all over with new vendors, etc. Even without any data loss this gets old. I promise you get tired of this after a while. It might seem like that would never happen and then one day it does.
You can get so much more done if you can actually afford to use the cloud. I have a really hard time believing that many people are genuinely winning on total cost of ownership with self hosting.