The numbers don’t start to approach similarity probably until you’re managing dev machines for hundreds, if not thousands of developers. Then you’re starting to talk about the scale needed have managers dedicated to the sysadmins, managers dedicated to dev network ops, etc etc. Those are all people you could outsource to the cloud.

But I imagine it’s the same value prop as other cloud services. It’s often cheaper to run legacy architecture in legacy ways, but there are technologies and concepts only available when running at cloud scale, and for those use cases you’re getting a discount over trying to roll your own.