I 100% agree with this. I don't see how the average internal platform-engineering team or "devops" team will be a better platform-engineering team than AWS/GCP etc.

This is exactly how I've been selling the whole idea of hardcore, cloud-native to leadership & our customers. Most responses begin something like:

"By leveraging the capabilities of a multi-trillion dollar Death Star ..."

The objective is to get completely out of the game of managing VMs, certificates, authentication, MFA, et. al. There is no way in hell we can do a better job than any cloud provider when it comes to compliance, consistency, security, etc.

Maybe when we have 10k+ employees we can reconsider the benefits of suffering additional complexity.

you’ve clearly never built a website of any scale or complexity on any of these clouds. they’re esoteric and fussy. the documentation is often poor and wrong. they trick organizations by providing tiers of expensive support but it’s not great, especially when you’re running into a novel problem. there are “easy” plug and play solutions offered but they cost a lot and come with tons of drawbacks. Building a functional, secure website at scale is a lot different than exposing some ports and loading certs.

> you’ve clearly never built a website of any scale or complexity on any of these clouds.

That's a hell of an assumption.

> there are “easy” plug and play solutions offered but they cost a lot and come with tons of drawbacks.

Agreed. But, I'd argue that these drawbacks/constraints are exactly what you need when you are faced with a virtually unlimited # of choices. When you are building software that needs to survive audits and is sold to financial institutions with 5+ year contracts, intentionally paying to have your hands tied is a fucking blessing.

I also used to shit all over the cloud until I was put in charge of the whole product stack and had to field difficult phone calls from other CTOs. You may find your position change over time too if you are put into this kind of a situation.