I feel like a lot of that shifted now.

You can just have on-premise k8s and keep most of the velocity gained from developers being able to "just run stuff" instead of anything having to go thru sysadmins.

You can just rent few servers off OVH to start and not have to worry about actual hardware, while still being few times cheaper than cloud.

Yeah you won't have access to the slew of cloud services and will have to deploy your own database but with amount of readily available code and software to do it it doesn't really slow down experimenting all that much