I think most times the horror stories and complexities of DevOps from the past (which likely paved the path for convenient cloud providers) is what keeps people

I think most times the horror stories and complexities of DevOps from the past (which likely paved the path for convenient cloud providers) is what keeps people away from running their own servers. That being said, I run much smaller projects and servers and have not worked at a scale that really requires heavy workloads that generates thousands of monthly bills at GCP. So I think most devs being conditioned to start their first projects on the free-tiers of most cloud providers makes it really difficult for them to move to their own servers when they need it.