I don't think the answer is so black-and-white. IMO This only realistically applies to larger companies or ones that either push lots of traffic or have a need for large amounts of compute/storage/etc.
But for smaller groups that don't have large/sustained workloads, I think they can absolutely save money compared to colo/dedicated servers using one of multiple different kinds of AWS services.
I have several customers that coast along just fine with a $50/mo EC2 instance or less, compared to hundreds per month for a dedicated server... I wouldn't call that "ten times" by any stretch.
Small companies should go for the likes of Hetzner/OVH, which is still 10+ times cheaper than AWS.
AWS is for anyone with a fear of committing to a particular amount of resource use, but once you've tried both and realised the price and performance differential, you realize you can easily way overcommit and still come out ahead, so it's not actually that scary. Plus, nobody's stopping you from continuing to spin up EC2s when your real servers are fully utilized.
Hard disagree... I think these black-and-white opinions are disingenuous, lack important nuance and are often just incorrect.
I even have customers on $3/mo EC2 instances... the cheapest dedicated server on OVH is still twenty times more expensive than that. I don't think there's any way to "come out on top" with OVH in that scenario, short of maybe claiming that the customer is somehow "doing it wrong" by only paying for what they need.
And yes hetzner/ovh have $3-4 cloud instances too, but now you're just directly competing with AWS and I don't see any benefit to call one any better than the other.