> If another team is provisioning hardware for me to write the software on, and it now takes 2 weeks to provision virtual hardware that could take seconds, then they are also not helping in the sale or the production of widgets.
Well in this example, the ops team slowing down pointless dev work by not delivering the platform that work is going to happen on quickly are effectively engaged in costs savings for the org. The org is not paying for the platform, which helps them because the project might be canceled anyway, and plus the slow movement of the org may give them time to organize and declare their real priorities. Also due to the slow down, the dev and the ops team are potentially more available to fix bugs or whatnot in actual widget-production. It's easy to think that "big ships take a while to turn" is some kind of major bug or at least an inefficiency, but there are also reasons orgs evolve in that direction and times when it's adaptive.
> Often times people are so ensconced in their tech bureaucracy they think they are the tail that wags the dog.
Part of my point is that, in general, departments develop internal momentum and resist all interface/integration with other departments until or unless that situation is forced. Structurally, at a lot of orgs of a certain size, that integration point is ops/devops/cloud/platform teams (whatever you call them). Most people probably can't imagine being held responsible for lateness on work that they are also powerless to approve, but for these kind of teams the situation is almost routine. In that sense, simply because they are an integration point, it's almost their job to absorb blame for/from all other departments. If you're lucky management that has a clue can see this happening, introduce better processes and clarify responsibilities.
Summarizing all that complexity and trying to reduce it to some specific technical decision like cloud vs on-prem is usually missing the point. Slow infra delivery could be technical incompetence or technology choices, but in my experience it's much more likely a problem with governance / general org maturity, so the right fix needs to come from leadership with some strong stable vision of how interdepartmental cooperation & collaboration is supposed to happen.