This factually did not play out like this in my experience.

The company did need the same exact people to manage AWS anyway. And the cost difference was so high that it was possible to hire 5 more people which wasn't needed anyway.

Not only the cost but not needing to worry about going over the bandwidth limit and having soo much extra compute power made a very big difference.

Imo the cloud stuff is just too full of itself if you are trying to solve a problem that requires compute like hosting databases or similar. Just renting a machine from a provider like Hetzner and starting from there is the best option by far.