The thing is that startups often don't have the time or capital to build a data center even though public cloud is just more expensive. If you're bootstrapping a business then it makes sense. My advice would be to always use only those features of the public cloud that you can also use on your private cloud, such as Kubernetes.
I am confused. I am not saying anything about building a datacenter
How do people think that's the only two options (AWS/cloud or build a datacenter)? It astounds me.
There's _so_ many providers of 'bare metal' dedicated servers - Hetzner and OVH come up a lot, but _before_ AWS there was ev1servers (anyone remember them?).