All I can say is that this hasn't been my experience. Setting up a single server is much the same whether it's on-prem or at a colo facility or some VM in the cloud, but the amount of added complexity to set up non-trivial networking and security and redundancy/failover and backups and all that stuff in the cloud is far more complicated -- if you don't already know how to do it -- than just setting up a few servers directly. The only exceptions IME tend to be the most basic and essential services, like effectively infinitely scalable storage and managed databases. Not coincidentally, I suspect, these are the kinds of cloud services that almost everyone uses, and often (as this very HN discussion demonstrates) the only ones.
There is still considerable value in the on-demand nature of cloud hardware, instead of waiting for stuff like physically assembling new servers and then shipping them and then installing them in the rack all before you can even start setting up the software, but IME the simplicity emperor has no clothes. Just look at the number of anecdotes about even quite large and well-established businesses that have had systems go down because they didn't fully understand AZs and failover arrangements, or have been landed with some crazy high bill because they didn't fully understand all the different things they were going to be charged for, or have been breached because they left some S3 bucket open.
There is still considerable value in the on-demand nature of cloud hardware, instead of waiting for stuff like physically assembling new servers and then shipping them and then installing them in the rack all before you can even start setting up the software, but IME the simplicity emperor has no clothes. Just look at the number of anecdotes about even quite large and well-established businesses that have had systems go down because they didn't fully understand AZs and failover arrangements, or have been landed with some crazy high bill because they didn't fully understand all the different things they were going to be charged for, or have been breached because they left some S3 bucket open.