> Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers

This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.