The cost of cloud

Having said that, your requirement is pretty absurd. Billions of people choose to own and maintain houses and cars and cook their own food because it's cheaper than the alternatives. Nobody expects them to be professional mechanics or cooks.

I do my own taxes, but maybe that's just easier in Europe and is definitely easier for individuals. That said, there's no reason why a LibreOffice spreadsheet would be an insufficient solution for handling taxes and other things like that.

I also haven't eaten out in years, the closest to that was ordering some Wolt when hanging out with my friends pre-COVID, because they wanted to try some. Apart from that, it's all just home cooked meals for me and that's pretty great. It also seems to be working out great for the folks over at https://www.reddit.com/r/mealprep/top/?t=month

At work, the company that i work for have their own building and have their own support staff as well, which seems to be working out great for them.

Furthermore, there are plenty of on prem resources that are used and despite the disadvantage of lacking self-service in many cases, there's very little difference in configuring and running software for deployments, with something like Ansible and containers. Even moreso when you have to support clients that have their own particular data centers and on prem deployments, which might differ noticeably from public cloud offerings. That's even not thinking about things like compliance in regards to what data can be stored where.

Personally, i also have a homelab with some repurposed old computers with 200 GEs and value RAM, a few HDDs and WireGuard for working around NAT and exposing my sites to the world through a pretty cheap cloud VPS or two from https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link, to make hosting cheaper if anyone else uses them). Of course, when i need 24/7 uptime, i do use their VPSes in a hybrid cloud setup, especially since my blog getting 30k views could be a bit taxing on a residental 4G LTE modem connection.

The argument about competencies, ecosystems, 3rd party offerings, outsourcing and so on is probably a valid for some, but not for me and not for many companies out there - too often you end up depending on SaaS solutions which vendor lock you and might cause you to spend unreasonable amounts of money, or will let you remain ignorant about how to actually manage the software that you're using, i think SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute) is a relevant term here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

That said, what works for me and even the company that employs me, won't work for others. And what works for others, won't work for me. This is all because of how different the circumstances of various people out there are: i cannot afford AWS, i cannot afford Azure, GCP and managed services for my own needs.

I currently pay 320 EUR for 6 cloud VPSes per year (and additional amounts for the occasional replacement HDD for my homelab), whereas others pay similar amounts for their cloud platforms of choice per month. For them, depending on their circumstances, it might be more cost effective to spend their time working and throw money at problems, whereas for me it's almost always more cost effective to learn the tech myself.

Similarly to how in Latvia you could hire a team of developers for what one developer would cost in the US. Companies have other factors to consider, of course, but this is just one example - the alternative (opportunity) costs of individuals.

Edit: Of course, some in the comments are talking about hundreds of VPSes/VMs/nodes and in my eyes, that's just an order of magnitude or two higher than what i'm talking about. I've seen plenty of companies in my country running their own data centers and there have been relatively few issues with those that i'm aware of. Something like Ansible and container clusters can scale pretty far!

The problems were more often caused by either mismanaged environments/deployments by developers/agencies who just didn't care about shipping sustainable software but cared more about getting paid and making their software someone else's problem, or making mistakes early in the development and not considering load testing and scalability of the systems as priorities. I'd argue that you can do bad engineering anywhere, though, be it on prem or in the cloud.

I've been in companies that owned their datacenters and it was much, much cheaper than using any cloud service.

Poorly managed datacenters exist but that's an organization problem. Remove the datacenter and you'll have poorly managed cloud instances and services costing millions.