> I hear this argument a lot, but every startup I've been involved with had a full-time DevOps engineer wrangling Terraform & YAML files - that same engineer can be assigned to manage the bare-metal infrastructure.

Bare metal infrastructure requires a lot more management at any given scale. I mean, you can run stuff that lets you do part of the management the same as cloud resources, but you also have to then manage that software and manage the hardware.