> I hear this argument a lot, but every startup I've been involved with had a full-time DevOps engineer wrangling Terraform & YAML files - that same engineer can be assigned to manage the bare-metal infrastructure.

Bare metal infrastructure requires a lot more management at any given scale. I mean, you can run stuff that lets you do part of the management the same as cloud resources, but you also have to then manage that software and manage the hardware.

Define "a lot".

We colocate about 20 servers and on the average month, no one spends any time managing them. At all.