One of these opinions included how to work with "the cloud" quickly, reasoning it made the engineer capable of reading API docs.

I am extremely opposed to this idea, as much so that I thought I'll never strive for becoming a senior if that entails knowing how to use things like AWS. To keep it simple, I will never use a product that utilizes a "pay as you go" pricing model making my bills unpredictable.

I know that using things like AWS simplifies the deployment part a lot. But I also know that cloud performance is not as good as people think.

Point is, I am trying to grow as an engineer but not by throwing money at a bunch of companies and call it a day.

To dodge the cloud, I'd need physical infrastructure. How far can I get with this? Especially on the lower end of budgets? Ill never run a global scale application. I'd be surprised if any of my apps would ever have more than 10k users. This seems extremely doable with physical hardware.