I've done it. It's nowhere as complicated as you make it seem. It definitely doesn't kill - no more than failing to manage your software tech debt. In fact, the latter is both harder keep up with and more risky, because it changes faster than the low level stuff, to support business needs.

With the cloud you have IT/DevOps deal only with scaling the software components of the infra. When doing on-prem they take on the physical layer as well. Do you have enough trust in them to scale the physical part where needed?