It really depends on how far away from the data center you are. I used to live close to Amsterdam and that felt basically local, even with a not-amazing internet connection. Right now I live in the Valencia (Spain), with a local and not very well paired ISP. There is lag, but it is just about acceptable for platformers and action/adventure games. I wouldn't recommend it for shooters.
The cost ended up being around 1€/hr when the instance was on, and 0.06€/day for the storage. I am sure this could be optimized (e.g. use snapshots and spot instance) - but I just couldn't be bothered to. For me it is worth it.
I don't use a local VM or bootcamp because I just don't have a powerful enough computer to run AAA games from the last 5 years or so - even earlier if the game is badly optimized. Now with an M1 they're not even compatible.
Stadia, GeForce NOW, Xbox Game Streaming and PlayStation Now: I've tried them all, and GeForce NOW specifically is very good. But, they only allow me to play a subset of my large pre-existing game library, and/or make me buy games again, which I'm not interested in.
Stadia is specially bad at this, having to purchase on a game-by-game basis, not being compatible with any existing ecosystem (Steam, PS, Xbox have cloud saves and friend lists), and then trusting Google to run my game forever on their servers after paying a one-time cost.