And that's why cloud will win every single time, forever, on all metrics.
Because the cloud requires less engineers to achieve the same work, as it takes care of the low level hardware work.
That used to work well before the "cloud" era, and still does.
If you use some VM-based cloud infrastructure you will still need a bunch of good system/linux admins to make your application work on the linux in the cloud. Without these, you're toast.
Bare metal requires you to have both good system and linux admins, and on top of that, good hardware admins, networks and datacenter hands. These are different skill sets.
So again: If you do the bare metal thing right at the scale it pays for itself, you'll probably end up paying both the skillset for the cloud deployment, and add the hardware skillset on top.
I believe, usually, "bare metal" hosting means you order the hardware, get it installed, but networking/cooling/power supply/etc are done by the datacenter people, not your own staff (your own staff may be not even permitted to enter the server room). No less-common specialized hardware to deal with, either.
System engineers must known OS internals well. If they do, it's unlikely they can debug, say, a kernel memory leak (which can be a thing in a VM), but not a lockup in a network card driver's interrupt handler (which is close to impossible in a cloud VM, but I saw this on a bare metal). Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be, like, too specialized and just weird sort of specialization. Am I wrong?
But if the problem is in the software stack, one would still need competent sysadmins/system engineers with skills to diagnose and resolve the issue. When (just a random example) oom-killer wreaks havoc and free(1) insists there's more than half of physical memory still available, it doesn't matter whenever one's in the cloud or not.
I believe, skilled system engineers are still a requirement for any large project, be it in cloud or not.