Managing tens of millions of dollars in physical and cloud infrastructure at multiple providers/dcs for a publicly traded company like I am now? No, that's not the reason to use cloud infrastructure at all. Cloud in this case is more about capacity planning and avoiding managing hardware inventory than anything.
I know their video encoding platform is heavily tied to AWS because the teams that built it optimized for cost (which for them makes a certain amount of sense) and they massively parallelize the encoding work. I talked to some of their engineers at re:Invent last year and it was kind of interesting. They aren't using a lot of AWS-specific stuff though, just AWS EC2 reserved instances.
I don't think that just because they're Netflix that everything they're doing is correct. This can't possibly be true.
If all you're doing is hosting a bunch of VPS's, you're really not saving yourself too much over just using a bunch of colocated servers. You can also get much cheaper, less reliable, less geographic diverse hosting somewhere else.
But I would have my head handed to me if I even suggested to a company to base their entire infrastructure on Linode instead of AWS, Azure, or even GCP.