I have not once said that cloud is the only option. You're arguing with a straw man.

If you're spending millions on infrastructure, you should absolutely do a rigorous analysis of whether the cloud is better or worse.

Yeah, it's not a direct quote. However, that is how I interpret the sentiment that those who fight the cloud will be fired. You suggest that's an unfair interpretation? You can say "cloud may not be the only option" all you want, but "those who oppose cloud will be fired" ensures that somehow, everyone in your organization will believe the cloud to be a supremely good option. :)

Because I do fully believe that the cloud is the superior solution for most businesses, especially those employing sysadmins.

I've seen way too many companies with full-time sysadmins maintaining only a few dozen servers. The significant cost savings come from eliminating those positions.

Who administers the servers after you eliminate those positions? Sysadmins mostly do operating system administration, not hardware maintenance. AWS boots you into an empty operating system that still needs to be configured, secured, backed up, etc. You still need sysadmins! In fact, cloud tends to require more of them because people spawn a lot of instances.

If you have a bunch of idle sysadmins because you thought you'd have to replace a system's drive every week and hired 4 extra hardware-only sysadmins, you can probably fire them without moving to the cloud and save even more money, right?

If you can treat your instances as ephemeral, it's a lot easier to manage them.