First off, the Cloud isn't expensive. Cloud misuse and bad architecture is expensive. It's a lack of skill (and to some degree tooling as well) that cause this to happen, expensive is not some inherent property of the cloud. Also, unless you are in some sort of business that has suddenly found itself without the need to innovate, or you are building a very commoditized thing, there is no reason to ever go in house.

Second, the reason people go cloud is not because they can't be bothered to configure things. It's because they have realized that any time spent doing undifferentiated work like that is a complete and utter waste of time and capital.

Third, the clouds power (and ultimately why it's less expensive) is not its ability to spin up infra in a hurry, the clouds power is elasticity. Properly architected cloud applications spin resources down as freely as they spin up, without intervention. You don't pay for idle and you certainly don't have to pay an army of people to maintain things that are now completely automated and realized in code or at the very least managed (without you having to think about it) for you.

Going multi-cloud, and forcing yourself to use the lowest common denominator services that are common across cloud providers is a really great way to miss out on all of those things.

So has Netflix, Disney+, Intuit, Capital One not reached that scale?

At a previous gig, they were moving from on-prem to cloud for accounting purposes.

Bare metal definitionally means not a VM.