Re: "an initial euphoric rush to the cloud"
Yes, because there suddenly was a thing called DevOps which said that development and operation should be run by the same team. This sure makes sense in a certain cases, but tbe CxO's interpreted it as 'fire all the Ops people' and the Devs where sold the lie that you can do Ops without knowing anything about it using <insert cloud provider here>.
But the thing that fascinates me most is how black and white this discussion is. It seems that the options are either on prem do everything yourself on your own hardware or go all in on cloud using all the features that lock you to a provider. You can still rent managed hardware in a datacenter, you can run your stuff on standard virtual servers that are trivial to move to a different provider. It's generally trivial to find a solution where you don't have to deal with your own hardware but aren't locked to a provider either.