> I am one of those thick-skulled data center tech monkeys that for the most part doesn't know shit about the bigger picture, and knows only how to rack servers, connect network cables and replace hard drives

Don't know if this is useful in your case but, the "cloud" does no magically means those thing do not exist. A lot of the concepts that exist in hardware IT systems (networks, firewalls, proxies, routers, balancers, etc) have cloud equivalents. Maybe with a bit of work you can "transfer" your skills and become a "Cloud DevOps": Get into GCS, AWS, Azure, OCI and other cloud providers. These jobs are becoming more and more in request.

Good luck!