I think it wins because opex is seen as stable recurring cost and capex is seen as the money you put in your primary differentiation for long term gains.

For mature Enterprises my understanding is that the financial math works out such that the cloud becomes smart for market validation, before moving to cheaper long term solution once revenue is stable.

Scale up, prove the market and establish operations on the credit card, and if it doesn’t work the money moves onto more promising opportunities. If the operation is profitable you transition away from the too expensive cloud to increase profitability, and use the operations incoming revenue to pay for it (freeing up more money to chase more promising opportunities).

Personally I can’t imagine anything outside of a hybrid approach, if only to maintain power dynamics with suppliers on both sides. Price increases and forced changes can be met with instant redeployments off their services/stack, creating room for more substantive negotiations. When investments come in the form of saving time and money, it’s not hard to get everyone aligned.

True, but for a lot of companies “our servers are on-prem” is not a primary differentiator.

Capex may also require you to take out loans