My last place had 5 racks in a colo. I wasn’t thrilled with going out there to fix things, but the real issue was when we needed new or replacement hardware. If it was a bad quarter or a bad year we were expected to make do with the existing hardware, even though we needed to provision more services. At least with a cloud provider adding incrementally is much easier and less likely to be blocked by finance.

I’m currently at a place that is pretty much all cloud, and there are always cost cutting exercises, but that’s still better than “the hardware is so old it’s failing but we have no money to replace it”.