FWIW, I'm in your camp mostly too. That expert may not know what to do either, or... will contradict earlier folks and say "you need to redo all of this pile..

FWIW, I'm in your camp mostly too. That expert may not know what to do either, or... will contradict earlier folks and say "you need to redo all of this pile..." and you'll be stuck. I've no doubt there are some workloads that really do require a level of complexity that various cloud systems offer. Much of what I've seen doesn't require it, but once someone starts down that road, they're 'justified' in learning more and tying more stuff to the cloud provider's way of doing things. I cut my teeth setting up servers back in the 90s, and that you can spin up 'full' servers (thinking various shades of VPS) in a few seconds is crazy great. But we're somehow now 'past' that... and we have mountains more complexity to consider.