That's not my experience. My experience is that operating systems outside of AWS is not much different in terms of staff time than operating systems on AWS, and for most people network availability issues are far down the list of outage reasons.

I've not ever seen any non-AWS setups where manpower or network stability contributed anywhere remotely enough to operations to eat up the cost advantage over hosting elsewhere.

There are good reasons to use AWS, if you can leverage their various services, and hosting isn't a large part of your cost, but price is not it.

Really you probably never hired people.

I have hired dozens of engineers over the last 20+ years I've done this, so maybe you shouldn't jump to conclusions to you have no basis for.