All of the complexity of onprem, especially when you need to worry about failover/etc can get tricky, especially if you are in a wintel env like a lot of shops are.
i.e. lots of companies are doing sloppy 'just move the box to an EC2 instance' migrations because of how VMWare jacked their pricing up, and now suddenly EC2/EBS/etc costing is so cheap it's a no brain choice.
I think the knowledge base to set up a minimal cost solution is too tricky to find a benefit vs all the layers (as you almost touched on, all the licensing at every layer vs a cloud provider managing...)
That said, rug pulls are still a risk; I try to push for 'agnostic' workloads in architecture, if nothing else because I've seen too many cases where SaaS/PaaS/etc decide to jack up the price of a service that was cheap, and sure you could have done your own thing agnostically, but now you're there, and migrating away has a new cost.
IOW, I agree; I don't think the human capital is there as far as infra folks who know how to properly set up such environments, especially hitting the 'secure+productive' side of the triangle.
> At my job we use HyperV, and finding someone who actually knows HyperV is difficult and expensive...
Try offering significantly higher pay.