Which can cause considerable "amusement" depending on the provider - one I won't name directly but is much more centered on actual renting racks than their (now) cloud offering - if you had a virtual machine older than a year or so, deleting and restoring it would get you on a newer "host" and you'd be faster for the same cost.

Otherwise it'd stay on the same physical piece of hardware it was allocated to when new.

Amusing is a good description.

"Hardware degradation detected, please turn it off and back on again"

I could do a migration with zero downtime in VMware for a decade but they can't seamlessly move my VM to a machine that works in 2024? Great, thanks. Amusing.

I have always been incredibly saddened that apparently the cloud providers usually have nothing as advanced as old VMware was.

Cloud providers have live migration now but I guess they don't want to guarantee anything.

It's better (and better still with other providers) but I naively thought that "add more RAM" or "add more disk" was something they would be able to do with a reboot at most.

Nope, some require a full backup and restore.

Resizing VMs doesn't really fit the "cattle" thinking of public cloud, although IMO that was kind of a premature optimization. This would be a perfect use case for live migration.