Getting the hardware closer to the users has always been trivial - call up any of the many hosting providers out there and get a dedicated server, or a colo and ship them some hardware (directly from the vendor if needed).
People who write that, well...
If you're greatly impacted by performance problems, how does that become a physics problem that has as a solution which is being closer to your users?
I think you're mixing up your sales points. One, how do you scale hardware? Simple: you buy some more, and/or you plan for more from the beginning.
How do you deal with network latency for users on the other side of the planet? Either you plan for and design for long tail networking, and/or you colocate in multiple places, and/or you host in multiple places. Being aware of cloud costs, problems and limitations doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't use cloud at all - it just means to do it where it makes sense.
You're making my point for me - you've got emotional generalizations ("you lose all credibility"), you're using examples that people use often but that don't even go together, plus you seem to forget that hardly anyone advocates for all one or all the other, without some kind of sensible mix. Thank you for making a good example of exactly what I'm talking about.
I ping HN, it's 150ms away, it still renders in the same time that the Google frontpage does and that one has a 130ms advantage.
As someone in New Zealand, latency does really matter sometimes, and is painfully obvious at times.
HN's ping for me is around: 330 ms.
Anyway, ping doesn't really describe the latency of the full DNS lookup propogation, TCP connection establishment and TLS handshake: full responses for HN are around 900 ms for me till last byte.
Yes, sometimes.
You know what matters way more?
If you throw 12MBytes to the client in a multiple connections on multiple domains to display 1KByte of information. Eg: 'new' Reddit.
Let's squint hard enough to pretend a CDN does not qualify as "the cloud". That alone requires a lot of goodwill.
A CDN distributes read-only content. Any usecase that requires interacting with a service is automatically excluded.
So, no.
This isn't correct. Many applications consist of a mix of static and dynamic content. Even dynamic content is often cacheable for a time. All of this can be served by a CDN (using TTLs) which is a much simpler and more cost effective solution than multi-region cloud infra, with the same performance benefits.
This is where you lose all credibility.
I'm going to focus on a single aspect: performance. If you're serving a global user base and your business, like practically all online businesses, is greatly impacted by performance problems, the only solution to a physics problem is to deploy your application closer to your users.
With any cloud provider that's done with a few clicks and an invoice of a few hundred bucks a month. If you're running your hardware... What solution do you have to show for? Do you hope to create a corporate structure to rent a place to host your hardware manned by a dedicated team? What options f you have?