I would believe that, but we were hitting the limits of our huge servers. There's only so much QPS you can throw at a single box. These servers were also "pets" as opposed to "cattle", and a big part of the prep for cloud was treating them as cattle.
Seeing the opposite trend.
Because your own machines are so expensive and annoying to manage, you only get 500GB memory 40 cores servers. You don't optimize and you run stuff randomly on whatever seem available.
Whereas in the cloud, you put VMs per role, with appropriate sizing. And when someone asks for 5 machines with 16 cores, you can be like, WTF are you running with all that power???