Is there anything stopping those teams from deploying k8s and every possible apache product onto these machines?

There's also middle ground in the form of Digital ocean's kubernetes which runs noticeably cheaper than big tech cloud offerings.

You guys have teams that decide the infra they run ?

If they manage it in my company at least of course, the real question is if they want to manage it (and know what that means). Usually they don't, in my experience.

Those people will actually be grateful they don't have to deal and spend weeks to debug yet another cloud provider hidden gotcha or bug and convince support they are right. They will now very happy as they can now deliver value (at relative scale) and really speed up processes. I know I am.

Good ol' bare metal is real nice, but it won't save you from application complexity, security requirements, and so on - you still need to manage it somewhat. If you're not a startup looking for market fit at least.

I'm not sure about that. We get paid well for working with (or around) public cloud complexity, but I bet many of us would gladly manage much simpler setups like the Hetzner Cloud.