Sure, I have worked at companies that manage their IT infrastructure that way. It's fine, way more efficient and secure than letting every department do their own thing.

That was your fairly typical on-premise corporate hosting. Things have gotten better with the cloud but it's still hardly a free-for-all, use-whatever-you-want-with-no-oversight situation.

Cloud environments helped, but the kind of massively centralized environment they’re talking about in the cloud work still tends to mean “get 4 levels of approvals and you can get a t3.medium using our AMI with Java 6”. My point is just that successful IT needs people who understand the mission and share your incentives – you can outsource email and other generic services but most people here work on things which aren’t one-size fits all.