Yes. But people use "you have to hire people to manage it" as an argument against on-perm. When in practice, most companies hire "devOps engineers" or "cloud engineers" to manage their cloud infrastructure too. And those salaries seem higher than the infrastructure/ops guys of yesteryear. So resource cost isn't really an advantage.
don't forget the "cloud cost engineer", just to figure out how much it will cost to run the 20 services that should have been part of your app with random ways of billing the usage of it
What nerdix said, basically. People assume most devops work when you own hardware is hardware related, but for a typical setup, if your hardware related devops work make up more than a few percent of your total devops cost something is wrong.
As soon as the machine boots over PXE and is on the network, it becomes software. Hardware actually becomes easier to manage as you get more identical machines as you can do differential analysis to figure out which components could possibly be out of spec.
I have seen multiple thousand host clusters managed by 1-2 people, and day to day ops looked like absolutely nothing was happening. This included messing with hardware racking and networking. The most resource intensive was just uncrating, moving and routing cables.
Don't you also need them in a colo?