If you ignore the costs from stuff like vmware, vcenter, windows server, etc... sure. But it's weird to forget that managing VMs was a huge expense even before the shift to the cloud. No one was just hosting a few dozens or a few hundreds VMs without very expensive management software.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use the cloud for deploying your software. But instead of deploying hundreds of small services, you may just deploy a handful bigger ones, and are still good. And you may also not need 30 different AWS services, you may be good with a database, maybe a message broker and a container runtime.
If you keep the infrastructure simple, it’s also much easier to switch cloud provider and to set up testing systems.
