[nine_k]

VMs are useful when you don't own or rent dedicated hardware. Which is a lot of cases, especially when your load varies seriously over the day or week.

And even if you do manage dedicated servers, it's often wise to use VMs on them to better isolate parts of the system, aka limit the blast radius.

[kkfx]

Witch is a good recipe to pay much more thinking to be smart and pay less, being tied to some third parties decisions for anything running, having a giant attack surface and so on...

There are countless lessons about how owning hw is cheaper than not, there are countless examples of "cloud nightmares", countless examples of why a system need to be simple and securely design from start not "isolated", but people refuse to learn, specially since they are just employees for living on the shoulder of someone else means less work to do and managers typically do not know even the basic of IT to understand.