Windows had this problem much earlier with every employee getting a PC on their desk. They solved it with Group Policy and domains. That still works well.

SSH and Remote Desktop solve a different problem. It may not be the one you have - but some of us just need to log into the machine because we have needs that don’t fit into some predefined workflow. Or we have so few boxes it’s not worth it.

Consider SSHing into a large build machine for compiling as an example.

Cloud is irrelevant. Its scope and repeatable results. A decade ago I had these problems with owned facilities, owned hardware, and dedicated internal teams. But it was thousands of hosts, multiple datacenters, and thousands of internal users. My personal break point is/was “a few hundred” hosts. Below that bespoke management can scale at a reasonable human:resource ratio. Above that you need too many people, and then you cant control or inspect the rate of change or variance.