In regard to your Kingdom question, no.

- Humans are always peer relative, no exception.

If everyone around you is affected by the same thing, it doesn't affect you as much. It doesn't affect your chances to marry, have children or gain status, which tend to drive a lot of people (look at mimetic competition). When interest rates go up, it exposes the 10-15% of the population who were heavily debted, but the majority do fine, moan together, and move on, saving more cautiously.

So it does make a difference. Online Kingdoms are transient and flipping a switch; information advantages are more abound. That is not so true offline - the people you meet in person are roughly speaking, going through the same challenges on a macro economic scale as you.

People here rightly have an issue with the fact that technology is allowing consolidation and reducing the number of entrepreneurship options which have no fundamental reliance on a platform entity. Even though the rise of online sellers (Etsy, Ebay etc) has made the number of self-employed people or company directors rise on paper, it had not kept up with increases in population, and there are far less self-employed people earning a wage above the median salary wage than there were in say the year 2000. If you look at Microconf stats you will see that today the majority of entrepreneurs are earning similar amounts to employees; once you adjust for skill difference (entrepreneurs tend to have higher market value than the average employee), you can see something is going a little awry in the economy.

I agree with your point you'd waste too much time building from scratch. However, generally the bar for businesses and software has risen; I think this is because whereas in 2000 you might spend 50% of your time working with polished products from big companies, today you spend 80-90% of your time in Google Docs/Instagram. A single bug or slow load in that remaining 10% makes you quickly search for an alternate solution. But the fact building on existing platforms can abate the problem of delivering high quality value to the customer does not remove the risk it introduces to rely on a specific platform with arbitrary or non-existent customer support.

Back in the 2000s for example, people actually believed that technology would enable more global competition and more distributed business. So it's curious that it has turned on it's head.

Furthermore there is reason to be personally optimistic: over the course of their lifetimes, most people reach at least the top 30th income percentile for 10 years or more. In other words, with more experience and skill, most people earn enough to save money, and this applies across almost all demographics. Income correlates far more with age than basically anything else. Which is great because if you feel rubbish now in your 20s, your upwards potential is massive. It doesn't matter if in 20 years the dollar has collapsed, your income will likely be in the top 30-40%, and that will give you a significant edge in the economy, whatever it is relatively like for your peers.

It's about reputation. AWS has a solid rep. Google less so but it's still there. Alicloud even less. And there's still lots of small private clouds, the kind who will random your domain name after it expires.

The top AI companies are all bottom tier in reliability, it's practically the wild west. They'll expire your credits. You can't contact support. Sometimes you'll not get what you paid for and the helpful forum mods will ask if you logged into the wrong account.

Don't build a business in -someone else's- cloud. That's unfortunately how the logic follows, yes.

Of course there are variables. For example, AWS has a lot to lose if they start pulling things like this. Independence requires acting independently.