Competence isn't an unlimited resource. On-prem is nearly impossible to run without regularly taking your servers or storage or networks down with incompetent

Competence isn't an unlimited resource. On-prem is nearly impossible to run without regularly taking your servers or storage or networks down with incompetent staff. Cloud costs will make your eyes water with incompetent staff who decide to run everything 24/7 on over-provisioned overpriced vms. At the end of the day "but if we had awesome staff (that also didn't ask for too much in salary) it would be like this and that" is an academic consideration because that's not the hand we're playing with. Cloud is also so centralised that even if everybody collectively got better at optimising costs there's a serious risk that cloud vendors would just collectively fatten their margins. The inverse is also true, if on-prem suddenly became much easier to run, expect licensing and hardware costs to start creeping up from anybody with anything resembling a monopoly or cartel.