Sometimes it's faster and more cost-effective to use AWS. Other times -- such as when you spend a lot of time and/or money making up for the performance limits of the platform -- you lose. It all depends on what you need, and there are clear engineering trade-offs at play.

The problem comes when you don't make rational choices. If you're writing blog posts about how you're "all in" on one platform or another, you're either linkbaiting (this seems most likely to me), or you're not being rational about your choices.

Let's be honest: it isn't that hard to manage a rack of servers. Any competent engineer should be able to do the basic sysadmin tasks necessary, and aside from the setup costs, the amortized maintenance costs should be on the order of a few hours a month. Certainly, the wildly overblown claims of entire teams spending months to set up a few colocated servers...well, those teams are either completely incompetent, or there's some exaggeration going on.

Don't be afraid of colocating. Just be rational about what you need.