Oooh the latter would make so much more sense! I'm not a cloud developer, but a good chunk of the code I write runs in AWS Lambdas and EC2 Images and I was so confused as to what relation that would even have to local storage. If anything, I'm afraid of Terraform and it's arcane power

I'd say it's about cloud techs being "scared" of the local storage.
As it's usually linux on servers and windows on-prem workstations I'd say it's them being scared of storing anything locally.