Worse, they can potentially more than cancel it out, if they merely remove the "worrying about hardware" (yes, and network and load balancers and everything els

Worse, they can potentially more than cancel it out, if they merely remove the "worrying about hardware" (yes, and network and load balancers and everything else) aspects, which are, at least, well understood by some us out on the market, and replace it with "worrying about the provider" where a failure scenario is, not only more opaque, but potentially catastrophic, since it's a single vendor with all the infrastructure. It reminds me of AWS's opacity-as-antidote-to-worry with respect to hardware failures. If the underlying hardware fails, the EC2 instance on it just disappears (I've heard GCP handles this better, and AWS might now, as well). I like to point out that this doesn't differ much from the situation of running physical hardware (while ignoring the hardware monitoring), both from a "worry" burden perspective and from a "downtime from hardware failure" perspective.