Where does this stop? Do you produce your own electricity? Farm your own food? Make your own silverware and shoes? Sometimes it's just easier to outsource the things you don't want to (or aren't good at) doing yourself.

If I wanted to host a website, sure, I can build a server out of parts and negotiate with my ISP and get a business pipe and handle all caching and such. Or like I can pay a provider $5/mo and get better performance and reliability with no management overhead. Yeah, maybe over 5 years I'd save more money doing it myself... but it's not worth the time.

If I wanted to generate a photo or a dozen, or a few paragraphs of text, that's like a few cents worth of cloud AI. Maybe low single-digit dollars. Or I could spend thousands on fat GPUs or a Macbook, spend forever training it, and still end up with a sub-par result.

AWS is profitable not just because they're overcharging you but because they are providing a hugely useful service for millions of businesses that don't want to deal with that infrastructure themselves, any more than they'd want to manage their own plumbing or electrical grid or roads and bridges leading to their office. DIY makes sense if you're doing it as a hobby or if your scale is so big that you would incur significant savings to in-house it, but for millions of small and medium businesses, it's just not the most practical approach. Nothing wrong with that.

I mean, it's like saying development is such a lost art... why hire a dev if you can learn to code yourself? Sure, but not everyone wants to, can, or has time.