But most cloud deployments have config management too. Using Ansible/Terraform/Kubernetes on bare metal isn't much different than using Ansible/Terraform/Kubernetes in the cloud.

How so? You should still be doing those things with cloud deployment anyway. The alternative is (the pretty terribly named) "click ops" where devops folks have to fiddle with some cloud UI settings to make production changes or go through wizards to attempt to replicate an environment.

If you are doing your environment config as code it ultimately shouldn't matter if your target is a dedicated server, a vm or some cloud specific setup configured via an api.

You don't escape configuration with the cloud unless you are talking about the most simple of use cases on a platform like Heroku.