Managed servers reduce the on-prem skillset requirement and can also deliver a lot of value.
The most frustrating part of hyperscalers is that it's so easy to make mistakes. Active tracking of you bill is a must, but the data is 24-48h late in some cases. So a single engineer can cause 5-figure regrettable spend very quickly.
What size companies are we talking about
I've seen this in startups with 7 figure ARR (where annual cloud costs were also 7 figures).
Also seen that in F500 where a single architect caused a 5-figure mistake which remove cloud privileges from the entire architecture team. Can't make it up.
I mean 5 figures is nothing to most companies when your spending 10s of millions on aws.
7 figures is single digit millions. 5 figures is a single silly mistake. Just enabling more verbosity on logs is enough to trigger that in a day. Such mistakes would be found monthly. We could have easily had 10% more engineers with the same budget if it weren't for lighting our runway on fire that way.