People pass around stickers (or at least used to) in hacker events saying that so there has to be something to it, right?

Protesting the term is, I'd wager, motivated by something like: it sounds innocuous to nontechnical people and obscures what's really going on.

It's not an insightful statement right now, but it was at the peak of cloud hype ca. 2010, when "the cloud" often used in a metaphorical sense. You'd hear things like "it's scalable because it's in the cloud" or "our clients want a cloud based solution." Replacing "the cloud" in those sorts of claims with "another person's computer" showed just how inane those claims were.

Only if owning the means of your production isn't important to you

Are you sure about that?

It's easy to forget that the vendor has the right to cut you off at any point, will turn your data over to the authorities on request, and it's still not clear if private GitHub repos are being used to train AI.

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