I used to provide devops consulting services exactly because nobody but large organizations "hires the builders full-time for continued maintenance" for dedicated servers any more than for cloud, because it takes really large systems before you need hardware intervention very often.

Even when working clients that had multiple racks of hardware they owned, I spent on average a couple of days a year dealing with that.

On the contrary, clients with cloud setups "hired the builder" for far more hours on average than those with dedicated setups. For my billable hours it'd have been far more beneficial if more people went to cloud setups.

Hiring the builders full-time is only the equivalent of building a private data center if building a private data center means buying the entire companies of Intel and Supermicro.