Nope, this seems to be the norm. I've worked on a couple colo servers that nobody at the company had ever actually seen in person. They figured out colo in Germany was the best deal, so they had some servers delivered straight to the DC and the staff there installed them and plugged them into an IP KVM. Not sure if this is a standard service most providers offer, but I'm sure a big enough cheque would convince most - and considering the cost of transporting both the hardware and engineer to install it, that cheque can be quite large.
Take all those things you just talked about, and expand them horizontally and vertically up the stack, and you have 'AWS'.
So not just 'a guy to replace the hardware' - but now it's software configurable, has all sorts of other, fancy things.
Time is money, and it's expensive to pay people to mess with things if they don't have to.
It's like this:
If your company needs 3 cars, you rent/lease them. You do not hire your own mechanics, even if technically speaking "we could change the oil for so much less!"
If your company is in the business of transportation, and you have thousands of trucks, you may want your own repair/maintenance team etc. instead of paying some service company a fat margin to change the oil.
Our in house data centres we visit more often, usually to add new equipment, doesn’t take long to walk down stairs.
I can’t think of the last time a hard drive failed
If you’re doing colocation to save money, you’ve also figured out that going to the datacenter sucks and it’s a terrible place to do work.
You’re not building your own servers from scratch, you’re generally purchasing them from a vendor who offers a warranty and optional on-site service.
Or you’re leasing them from a hosting company who will take care of those pesky RAID alarms for you.
You (or your hosting providers) have likely outfitted your server with remote out-of-band access to allow you to get into BIOS or the RAID controller without physically being in front of the server.
And finally, you have remote access to power cycle the server (or a batphone at your hosting provider to do it on your behalf).
I want to say that these datacenter-visit-prevention techniques have been near standard practice for a decade-and-a-half.
Or is it just me and my circle that do this?