It is, but that's not a useful or insightful thing to say

It's not an insightful statement right now, but it was at the peak of cloud hype ca. 2010, when "the cloud" often used in a metaphorical sense. You'd hear things like "it's scalable because it's in the cloud" or "our clients want a cloud based solution." Replacing "the cloud" in those sorts of claims with "another person's computer" showed just how inane those claims were.

No, it doesn't at all. "it's scalable because it's in the cloud" may be reductive nonsense or it could be true. It's scalable because it's on someone elses computer and in a matter of minutes it can be on one of their computers with twice the ram and vCPUs. That is a meaningful thing to say when the alternative is CAPEX heavy investment in your own infrastructure. Same with "our clients want a cloud based solution" in contrast with on-prem installs. They don't want your shitty pizza box in their closet, they want someone else to be doing the hosting.

Are you sure about that?

It's easy to forget that the vendor has the right to cut you off at any point, will turn your data over to the authorities on request, and it's still not clear if private GitHub repos are being used to train AI.

Two of these are basic contractual problems, your company should have a lawyer who can sort them out easily. The third (data being turned over to authorities) is something that the vast majority of companies do not care about in the slightest.

Only if owning the means of your production isn't important to you

People pass around stickers (or at least used to) in hacker events saying that so there has to be something to it, right?

Protesting the term is, I'd wager, motivated by something like: it sounds innocuous to nontechnical people and obscures what's really going on.