Your own lack of knowledge about how to make the cloud work properly doesn't mean it's completely useless. The "old school" knowledge is still very useful in building and troubleshooting cloud-based infrastructure. You're creating a false dichotomy.
I haven't found it too helpful when dealing with AWS and the serverless trend, whose popularity is really just based on price and economics, not technical superiority.
Serverless turns every simple system into a distributed system with the number of failure modes now multiplied by ten.
That sounds like fun.
I do know how to use serverless for the record, I just think it's an overhyped, overpriced waste of time.