In my experience it's often the other way around. CTO/mgmt/HR would rather swallow the perf/cost hit of Cloud because it makes auditing, compliance, support, dr, security, training and hiring easier. Not to mention it usually provides much more flexibility during the PMF stage of a startup (where product roadmap, team talent/bandwidth and execution speed are often much more important drivers than the raw perf/cost ratio of your infra).

There's definitely an argument to move (some) stuff off cloud later in the journey when flexibility (or dealing with flux/pivoting) becomes less of a primary driver and scale/cost start dominating.