Also, an 8k server is a big unit. Cloud services are much more granular. This is a problem of bare metal - it's easy to overprovision because the base unit is large, and one ends up being happy of having an "overprovisioned" system, when in reality it's money down the drain.
Also, you don't count the management of the 8k server. It may (but not necessarily) be at a click distance; if it is, the management hardware (eg. one from a very famous servers producer) may have a poor software.
There are reasons why, in some cases (of course, not in all or not in many), cloud may be more advantageous than an "8k" bare metal server.
All in all, I think without numbers, talking about metal vs. cloud in abstract, generic terms, makes a poor argument.
My point was that it's peanuts compared to the labor costs it saves. I've worked quite a few places where a single $2-3k server would have saved every employee around an hour a day. In some cases several machines would have saved an hour each.
Every person you don't need gets you more than one person worth of increased productivity due to scaling limits, (see also Fred Brooks, IT and HR - more employees, more support staff).
Rearchitecting may be necessary anyway, but doing this kind of work involves hiring and training better senior devs and retaining them for a couple of years at least. That's not cheap. It's A lot more expensive than those OPS guys you laid off.
I think what both of these scenarios share is that they're not about saving money. They're about empire building for the Dev manager.