Heh... glad to see this article.  I'd done some contract work for different companies where they contracted a "provider" for both hardware, SQL Server, and things like backups.   None of the companies the contracted through even had a DBA on call never mind on site.  The concept of RPO and RTO was inadequate (RPO = 1 week, RTO = 72 hours was the usual case) if it existed at all.  Their supposed "automatic index maintenance" operations were accompanied by demands to increase expensive paid disk space to rebuild indexes on large tables with nary a suggestion to partition things like temporally based Audit Tables that were WORM in nature.

Snake Oil is a good term that I'd use in such cases although my original thought was Cloud = Smoke and Mirrors.  I can certainly see uses for the Cloud and providers of hardware/SQL Server as the companies I described but it has to be done right.  Unfortunately, a lot of people that enlist such services do so because they don't  have the knowledge needed to stand up their own boxes and that also means they don't know what the providers actually need to provide.