Totally, though I think in a fast paced/under-resourced environment incentives matter, and ephemeral cloud vms incentive admins to use configuration management, whereas it's easy to take a shortcut in the moment and quickly manually install something/edit config on a rarely-changing dedicated host.

Obviously the same can be said for long running VMs, and this can be solved by having a disciplined team, but I think it's generally more likely in an environment with a single long running dedicated machine.