I'm not trying to dismiss the value there is in having highly scalable cloud architectures available to the projects that need them, but a huge proportion of projects will never need them.

Most projects don't even actually suffer for modest downtime, although you can achieve AWS-comparable downtime even without AWS/Google/Azure-style "cloud" architecture.

It can make a huge difference in operating and engineering costs to know which bucket your project fits in. Good architectural foresight can even let you smoothly move from one to other if unexpected growth or a pivot indicate that it's warranted.

Engineering is about understanding the scope/scale of problems, not about being dogmatic or getting caught up in problems that don't apply.