Wholehartedly disagree. I've been in large scale IT for 20+ years, working for deep pocketed companies. The costs of running old school IT with on prem data centers were orders of magnitude higher vs. what we pay for well architected serverless solutions these days. I remember having a $30MM/year line item for Oracle alone, running on expensive hardware that was sitting idle 90% of the time. Time sharing expensive hardware is the way to go.

Another thing is costs of building something new. In the old world it would mean doing the math on resource needs now and in the future, since adding Hw meant capital expenditure. No such problem now and its easier to get started, see if it works, and scale or kill early.

And of course as others have mentioned, keeping it all running requires expensive expertise. Esp. now with the internet that looks like automated wild west. You cant release a service without it being auto-probed and auto-attacked within 2-3hrs.

Nope. With the cloud, the costs have went down for any large coMpany, even those that just moved the old crap to VMs running on someone elses hw.