Meanwhile AWS is growing at 20%/year, Azure at 33% and GCP at 35%. That doesn't seem compatible with any kind of major cloud repatriation trend.
I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS. While I dont disagree AWS is charging a lot for their offering, putting AWS to other services isn't even a valid comparison.
Completely ignoring the basics such as Server / CPU / RAM / SSD quality. Network quality such as interconnect, redundancy, as well as Data Center quality. If you rally want to do simple price and spec comparison you might as well go to Lowendbox to find a low cost VPS which some people have been doing since 2008.
I really wish there is a middle ground somewhere before using Hyperscalers. Both DO / Linode couldn't reach a larger scale. Hetzner is expanding their Cloud offering only and no dedicated outside EU.
They didn't save a whole lot of money from it (they aren't spending a whole lot on it anyway), and now their business ever so slightly loses focus. Not to mention, as you said, the quality aspects. Cloud gives you many things "for free" (like local disk RAID, network and power redundancy, datacenter compliance, in-transit and on-disk encryption, optimized OS images, overall network security, controls around what their employees can do - that $5/month lowendbox provider from Romania is almost certainly logging into your VM and going through your files) which you lose when going to a "pre-cloud" provider.
if this approach to DC compliance/security/redundancy is good enough for the world's financial services industry then it's probably good enough for everyone else too
(but yes, then only saves about 90% of the cost instead of 95%)