I fire up vCPU or dedicated or bare metal in the cloud, doesn't matter, I simply cannot match the equivalent compute of real hardware and it's not even close.
But that isn't the delta I'm seeing, it's 5-10x performance delta not a 30-50% delta.
I would vaguely expect it to not match my workstation, sure, but all throughout this thread (and others) people have cited outrageous disparities i.e. 5x less performance that you'd expect even if you managed your expectations to e.g. 2x less due to the cloud compute not being a bare metal machine.
In other words, and to illustrate this with a bad example: I'd be fine paying for an i7 CPU and ending up at i5 speeds... but I'm absolutely not fine with ending up at Celeron speeds.