Man, that "glorified garages" line bugs me because it comes from a place of pure ignorance. I used to work at a place that ran a small colo footprint for their VoIP stuff, and the cloud team kept pushing to move it all over to AWS. Long story short, they finally did the math and realized the egress fees alone would eat them alive, plus the jitter on voice calls got way worse. Those same cloud folks never once had to explain to a customer why their 911 call dropped. There is a real gap between spinning up instances in a browser and keeping a physical box humming at 3 AM when a switch decides to die. Some of us actually like knowing where our hardware lives.