There’s a huge gulf between pub clowd and shitty on-prem.

We agree on this.

Redundant everything piped in. Redundant everything set up. We run VMs by terraform. Wheeeeee

For that customer of yours, is that a single datacenter or does is represent multiple datacenters separated by a large distance across a nation, or perhaps even across national borders?

Point is, posing shitty on-prem as the alternative to the clowd is moving the goalposts a bit.

I think ignoring that shitty on-prem represented a large part of IT infrastructure prior cloud providers is ignoring a critical point. Was it possible to have well-run enterprise IT data centers prior to cloud? Sure. Was everyone doing that? Absolutely not, I'd argue the majority had at least a certain level of jank in their infra and that that floor is raised with cloud providers. Just the basic facilities is enterprise grade irrespective of the server or app config.