I don't really like using analogies for this sort of thing as I think it muddles things more than it clarifies, and quickly leads to discussions about the analogy rather than the topic at hand, but if we must use one I'd say it's more analogous to a business deciding to purchase a company van or lorry. For a lot of businesses, this clearly isn't needed and renting one when you do is fine, but at some point it just becomes easier and more cost-effective to have your own (depending on what you do with it, nature of your business, etc.) in spite of the extra hassle of having to maintain, clean, etc. your vehicles.
We're just disagreeing when that point is reached.
In fact, there are very few companies over a certain size that haven't built a road. This kind of overhead is generally expected once you have scale, because the alternatives are far more expensive. Datacenters are similar.
If you're one of them, go get your datacenter.
By the same analogy, tech companies should not run from building server racks and/or datacenters. It may not be your company's core competency, but it should be one of your competencies to understand how to run a computer. It really doesn't take that much work to run 10 computers.
He doesn't see it as a fad to use the cloud and serverless, but as the natural way of things, like you don't build your own power plant or highway.