To give you an example - we run quite a lot of workloads on Azure app service, which isn't the same as bare metal, but does allow serious scaling if required.
We run most workloads on a 3.5GB/2 "vCPU" box. This costs around $70/month per instance. We actually haven't scaled this out past 8 instances, at a cost of $560/month (and that has been extremely rare).
On bare metal we could have ran it on a $100/month 16core/128GB box and always had that capacity in reserve. While app service gives a lot of benefits, the scalability argument is somewhat moot as basically you can provision all the capacity you would scale to 24/7 and still the same/less than cloud.
Maybe it's just the projects I've worked on, but I haven't really ever seen people require 100x or 1000x the capacity in a very short period of time (which obviously bare metal could not do). I've seen traffic grow that much - but generally over weeks, months or years.
We run most workloads on a 3.5GB/2 "vCPU" box. This costs around $70/month per instance. We actually haven't scaled this out past 8 instances, at a cost of $560/month (and that has been extremely rare).
On bare metal we could have ran it on a $100/month 16core/128GB box and always had that capacity in reserve. While app service gives a lot of benefits, the scalability argument is somewhat moot as basically you can provision all the capacity you would scale to 24/7 and still the same/less than cloud.
Maybe it's just the projects I've worked on, but I haven't really ever seen people require 100x or 1000x the capacity in a very short period of time (which obviously bare metal could not do). I've seen traffic grow that much - but generally over weeks, months or years.