GCP is an operational expense, whereas bare metal is operational + capital expense. It might be more expensive for cloud, but the accounting looks a little cleaner.

I worked for a company that had bare metal. They were always shipping parts around, lots of movement back and forth between the data center, lots of night deploys for ops team which meant a burden on the HR department. There was a general anxiety about security.

It might be "cheaper" on paper to run bare metal, but it means your managers and executives have to make a lot of dinky little decisions all the time. I'd happily pay more to "push and forget".