I see your point but my perspective on this shifted over the years. Whatever infra you set up, whether it's the public cloud or on prem, there is always the initial cost (starting with a simple account for small orgs, a landing zone for larger ones etc.) and this applies to every service, it's just registered in the books in a slightly different way. For example, whn you look at my Jira tickets, on prem we're patchng servers, and in the cloud we're usually updating container images. These two are not that different and you need to set aside some time for that. It's the same with upgrading Postgres on prem and RDS Postgres between major versions - you need to arrange the service window with product teams, do the migration on lower layers first and if all goes well you move on to prod.

Of course, many infra activities take less time in the public cloud. E.g. control plane maintenance and upgrades on EKS are managed by AWS and are mostly painless so you never worry about stuff like etcd. On the other hand, there is a ton of stuff you need to know anyway to operate AWS in a proficient and safe way so I'm not convinced the difference is that huge today.