You're kidding but I've seen migrations from data centers to aws (despite committing to much larger expenses) and from aws to data centers (mainly to save money).

In practical terms, the hassle of managing the hardware is far greater than having to manage software, especially now that everyone is on the container boat. Not that it was necessarily different for people on bsd + jails in the past, but that wasn't widespread.

I think dedicated server are a sweet spot of complexity / cost.

Yes?

Not sure why the '/s'. Options exist, and not just "AWS or GCP".

Sure aws, gcp and azure are interchangeably expensive