Because the default for companies today is cloud, even though it almost never makes sense. Sure, if you have really spikey load, need to dynamically scale at any point and don't care about your spend, it might make sense.

Ive even worked in companies where the engineering team spent effort and time on building "scalable infrastructure" before the product itself even found product-market fit...

Nobody said it's surprising though, they are well aware of it having done it for more than two decades. Many newcomers are not aware of it though, as their default is "cloud" and they never even shopped for servers, colocation or looked around on the dedicated server market.

I don't think they're not just aware. But purely from scaling and distribution perspective it'd be wiser to start on cloud while you're still on the product-market fit phase. Also 'bare metal' requires more on the capex end and with how our corporate tax system is set it's just discouraging to go on this lane first and it'd be better off to spend on acquiring clients.

Also I'd guess a lot of technical founders are more familiar with cloud/server-side than with dealing or delegating sysadmin taks that might require adding members to the team.

I agree, the cloud definitely has a lot of use cases and when you are building more complicated systems it makes sense to just have to do a few clicks to get a new stack setup vs. having someone evaluate solutions and getting familiar with operating them on a deep level (backups etc.).