> Every company out there is using the cloud and yet still employs infrastructure engineers to deal with its complexity. The "cloud" reducing staff costs is and was always a lie.

This doesn’t make sense as an argument. The reason the cloud is more complex is because that complexity is available. Under a certain size, a large number of cloud products simply can’t be managed in-house (and certainly not altogether).

Also your argument is incorrect in my experience.

At a smaller business I worked at, I was able to use these services to achieve uptime and performance that I couldn’t achieve self-hosted, because I had to spend time on the product itself. So yeah, we’d saved on infrastructure engineers.

At larger scales, what your false dichotomy suggests also doesn’t actually happen. Where I work now, our data stores are all self-managed on top of EC2/Azure, where performance and reliability are critical. But we don’t self-host everything. For example, we use SES to send our emails and we use RDS for our app DB, because their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay. That frees up our platform engineers to spend their energy on keeping our uptime on our critical services.