instead of like, a giant monolithic machine requiring both a salt water reservoir and an on-site nuclear power plant.
If you cannot literally infiltrate the cloud infrastructure by crawling through it's pipes, what's even the point of all this waste.
The problem with cloud computing is that they order datacenters worth of servers, and in 5 years time a lot of it is obsolete. That makes it worth it to standardize everything, and continually improve things. There are always servers to replace and cruft to remove.
Meanwhile I'm moving into industrial control systems at work, where you need tons of gizmos to control a giant machine that will last for 20 years+. They take at least a year to design and build, and we only get to make a couple of them each year.
So these things feature a couple of containers worth of electrical cabinets, where a coupe of them contain water cooled motor controllers, others have PLCs for processing sensor data and controlling actuators, and another has networking and SCADA computers. They are all professionally designed and build, with labels and everything. But it also results in a visual clutter which you won't see in a cloud datacenter rack. Think more like a nicely cable managed gaming pc than a server (no RGB though).
And then we get to the part where it has to last for 20 years. Things will break, a service engineer will be sent, and things are fixed as fast as possible. While the inside of the cabinets don't look like the magi, there are piles of emails, drawings and reports being produced. Figuring out what went wrong might mean having to read all of these to get clues to what the issue is.
Cloud has gotten boring, the action is at industrial control systems of factories, powerplants, ships, and other large equipment.