It's most of the cost at small companies. A lot of people underestimate the total cost of having employees perform tasks at unpredictable scale with unpredictable problems versus just writing a check each month.
It's true that cloud providers aren't reliably cheaper as some assumed at one point. But there's something to be said for cutting out the fully burdened costs of some number of employees (especially given everyone is saying tech talent is expensive and scarce at the moment) and just letting AWS deal with it even if you could theoretically do it cheaper yourself.
Not only that, but if you have a business that actually makes, sells, and ships something, your AWS bill is probably a tiny fraction of your expenses. Switching to physical servers would be a little like getting solar installed on your house - great in theory, but if the most expense it will displace is $150/month, is it the right problem to focus on?
True. Although I’d argue most companies are small enough that AWS itself represents more overhead than is optimal. They’d be better of on Heroku, or even just a single VM.
Certainly you can overcomplicate things with any of the big public cloud providers. As you say, many smaller companies would be better off with a SaaS, maybe a PaaS, and some VPSs, whether from one of the big guys or someone else.
I had to laugh at someone's comment around re:Invent last week that just because Amazon has to offer 17 types of databases for its customers (or whatever the exact quote was) doesn't mean you have to collect them all as if they were Pokemon.
I'm aware of the risks. That's why I said a culture of long-term relationships must be fostered if you want to pull such operations off.
Where I work right now people don't just quit two days later. They like the company and if they feel they want to go someplace else they're not being difficult about it. They cooperate in passing down their knowledge to colleagues before they go.