So can the cloud, and cloud has had more major outages in the last 3 months than I've seen on self-hosted in 20 years.

Deploys these days take minutes so what's the problem if a disk does go bad? You lose at most a day of data if you go with the 'standard' overnight backups, and if it's mission critical, you will have already set up replicas, which again is pretty trivial and only slightly more complicated than doing it on cloud hosts.

> ...you will have already set up replicas, which again is pretty trivial and only slightly more complicated than doing it on cloud hosts.

Even on PostgreSQL 18 I wouldn't describe self hosted replication as "pretty trivial". On RDS you can get an HA replica (or cluster) by clicking a radio box.