Maybe you need an MBA to help you understand that in many cases, it's incredibly more cost effective to use the cloud, because the marginal savings that could be achieved with on prem hardware are dwarfed by the cost of labour, and especially lost opportunity cost.

For most things 'local prem' is an optimization that usually needs on some degree of scale to justify, or, you have a peculiar setup i.e. a couple of well versed hardware and networking guys who have no problem with a bit of a physical setup. Which can be a bonus.

"I hope the zeitgeist changes any time soon."

No, it won't, it's going in the 'other direction' forever, because the 'economies of scale' at Amazon, it's incredibly difficult for individual engineers to compete with those efficiencies.

Just the opposite of 'being a problem for startups' , the 'cloud' has basically made entire swaths of types of startups possible where they wold not otherwise.

Like everything, you have to use think about it a bit but their costs are really, really transparent (imagine Oracle trying to do it ...).