My theory : Engineers rented servers and maintained them with software and packages and infrastructure scripts / code etc. Then this moved to cloud VMs cause it became easier for higher availability and sometimes cheaper too. Then VM costs started rising and cloud providers started offering tempting prices to use some of their services instead that integrated well with their VM infrastructure. Simultaneously engineers started to cost more money to maintain these systems and more people trained in 'cloud' became available for relatively cheap. So people moved their infrastructure to cloud offerings. Now both engineers and cloud services cost a lot of money. But now engineers who can maintain such infrastructure are far and few in between and also cost a lot of money while cloud offerings became turnkey literally.

So costs went from $80k an engineer a year maybe a decade ago with a few thousand to servers to $200k an engineer which you would struggle to find or $100k for a 'cloud engineer / architect' plus $100k to a cloud provider.

This sounds great in theory. Except that cloud providers are messy and once vendor locked in, you are in a big spiral. Secondly the costs can be hidden and climb exponentially if you don't know exactly what you are doing. You might also get into weird bugs that could be solved by a patch over a Monday to some package you could just update which might take months or never happen on a cloud provider. The reality of moving to cloud is not as rosy as it sounds.

Universities used to be the birth place of big projects that were created to solve problems they ran into hosting / running their own infrastructure. I hope that is still true.