I think you’re def right that deferring the responsibility is part of it. Now it’s not “IT dept is understaffed and underpaid” it’s “cloud provider’s bug and everyone else is down too so give us a break”. Cloud seems happy to take the blame but they want premium for it. In the end leadership aren’t really saving anything just appear more competent to their bosses.
Like almost everything it’s a trade off.
I see a lot of underpaid, short staffed IT staff moving to the cloud because it takes massive swaths of headache off their plate.