Many people who have ever had to deal with the long tail of insanities in physical hosting, like "the ceiling burst and dumped water on a rack", "the RAID controller's capacitors exploded and now you need to figure out what still works", or "for some reason three of the servers won't talk to this switch but talk to anything else using the same cables, and the switch ports work for other devices", would happily pay a premium to only deal with SaaS logistics.

(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)

I probably wouldn't start with buying a big server if I was just starting out. I would consider renting one from Hetzner, OVH, or many others.

There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.