You talk like using a physical server somehow prevents building a highly available system or from using automation. Why would the hardware be any more of a pet than any random VM in the cloud? You could also just run a hypervisor on the host and get the benefits of virtualization along with full control of hardware.
Sure, if a drive breaks you'd probably want to replace it instead of just replacing the entire machine; it's a thing you don't need to do with VMs, but that doesn't mean it's difficult. It definitely doesn't take "hours".
Managing physical setups is different from managing fleets of cloud instances, but it's not necessarily automatically inferior.
>"You talk like using a physical server somehow prevents building a highly available system or from using automation. Why would the hardware be any more of a pet than any random VM in the cloud?"
It is pure scaremongering and making not very nice assumptions about people's abilities without any real substance. If this is the idea of attracting customers or advocating the approach it seems like a very poor job.
Sure, if a drive breaks you'd probably want to replace it instead of just replacing the entire machine; it's a thing you don't need to do with VMs, but that doesn't mean it's difficult. It definitely doesn't take "hours".
Managing physical setups is different from managing fleets of cloud instances, but it's not necessarily automatically inferior.