A paradox is only at the most coarse-grained level. Cloud makes sense because of its cost-efficiency in scaling from nothing upwards. Then fails because of cost involved in keeping it running at scale. The thing to recognize is that what cloud is good for is rapid change. Once you have something stable, even at not-huge scales, bare-metal hosting may still make more sense.

All this happens willingly unless growth happened with your eyes closed, or really had no choice keeping up with it. Sure, use the cloud, but don't use every cloud-proprietary convenience. Use opensource software in a near-standard way. Even if using the cloud-vendor's offering, refrain from using proprietary extensions. If your plan is to grow and get out before things stabilize, then that's on who's come onboard, not resisted the conveniences, and remaining.