Usually those aren't the same engineers that manage the racked stuff in a datacenter and those that deploy the appps.
Last time I was working on prem, we would just buy a new 2U hypervisor server once in a while. Apps were all running on VMs anyway so the complexity was not seen by the same people. Storage were a multiple years deal. The biggest issue was storage estimation and paying from day 1 a storage that would be used fully only on year 5. But I don't think it was that expensive, just an accountability gymnastic comparing to a pay as you go system. And hyperconvergence was kind of meant to solve that although I didn't really had the chance to experiment with it in virtualized environments on prem.
Last time I was working on prem, we would just buy a new 2U hypervisor server once in a while. Apps were all running on VMs anyway so the complexity was not seen by the same people. Storage were a multiple years deal. The biggest issue was storage estimation and paying from day 1 a storage that would be used fully only on year 5. But I don't think it was that expensive, just an accountability gymnastic comparing to a pay as you go system. And hyperconvergence was kind of meant to solve that although I didn't really had the chance to experiment with it in virtualized environments on prem.