Cloud is more than just servers
It's a False comparison. Cloud gives global presence, so you can keep customer data within the customer's country - think GDPR. Cloud has availability zones to keep running despite natural disasters. Cloud machines are maintained for you - you're not paying for operators or server rooms, and your not maintaining Disaster Recovery sharing agreements with other companies. DRM can be rendered obsolete with High Availability that can't be achieved with racks of servers.
Kubernetes clusters and Virtual Instances allow for elastic scalability so you don't pay for a VM all month, you pay for capacity as demand increases and subsides.
You can avoid "vendor lock in" by avoiding PAAS services, and instead using licensed software for messaging, database, firewalls, appliances, etc., and take that with you if you jump from one Cloud to another, but doing so brings its own significant costs of maintaining all that software and dealing with installations, upgrades and patches. The Shared Costs of Paas maintaining that for you is part of a trade off.
Cloud offers DDOS protection that you can't acheive from your rack space. It offers continuous data backups and ability to restore in minutes. It offers ability to scale up 100-fold in minutes for 9/11 events.
Everything is a trade off, and each solution has some pros and cons. It is a mistake to look at any one solution and say it's bad because there are some cons. It is a mistake to cherry-pick cons and ignore alternate solution's cons in order to make a false argument.