This is a straw-man argument. Of course if the cloud could save me time and energy, I would use it, but it doesn't. In my experience, you spend just as much time in the long run tweaking/configuring the AWS console as you do simply running bash scripts on a baremetal server. That's why "AWS consultant" roles exist as a full-time job. The cloud does NOT save time for me, and it's far worse in many ways: opaque, more expensive, and can lull you into a false sense of security (what do you do, for example, if your cloud providers backups just fail one day?).
If you look from business perspective AWS consultant is as opaque as any SysAdmin with bare metal servers.
You don't even know if Sys Admin is doing any backups at all.
From perspective of a person that does not know anything about administering systems tweaking stuff in AWS is I would say a lot easier than setting up a server properly.
So people that know nothing about administering systems pay more because they don't have the knowledge.
If you have the knowledge then yes it is cheaper to run your own sever but what is obvious or easy for one person is not really true for someone else.
