[olieidel]

Even something as magical as a RAID won't make a technician instantly teleport to your server, power it down in zero seconds, swap out the hard drive and boot it back up in another zero seconds.

OPs comment is valid - physical servers might incur downtime.

But I do agree with your sentiment. "Downtime" is not an argument which should tilt the discussion towards either physical servers or the cloud. AWS data centers famously also have outages, while physical servers often have uptimes of multiple years. So what's better? It's hard to tell, but at the very least, none of these solutions is downtime-free.

[rcarmo]

No, but if you have backups and DR set up, most hyperscalers will just automatically move your workload someplace else upon failure within minutes (state management complexity notwithstanding—you need to architect for that).