I agree fully with this with one caveat: if you're in an location then managed servers can be cheaper than your own colo. E.g. I'm in London, and it's hard to beat Hetzner with colos near enough to me to be practical.

Still sometimes reasons to use colos, but I think it's important people consider that the choice isn't just cloud or your own equipment on prem or in a colo - managed servers can get you most or all of the savings too.

Agree about scale. Most software devs have no idea what can fit on a single server, and sometimes tend to start wanting complex scaling solutions for things where every possible customer they could ever get could fit on a single server