I sincerely appreciate your insight and anecdotes, as I have not had to live with Sf myself. I am too ignorant of the Sf platform to make an intelligent criticism of it, but I would be extremely surprised if it can do even half of what AWS can. I would be surprised if they are even trying to. So it does sound like sales pitch BS to me as well.
I’m not an AWS fanboy and don’t mean to sound like one. However, the number of products and services, and the sophistication of them, is fairly mind-blowing. And they add new stuff almost every week. It’s also expensive and monopolistic, so I don’t mean to praise them too much here.
They are probably different animals in some respects. On AWS, you can let them host basically every layer if you want, or you can let them only host the lower layers (VM and OS, for example) while you manage everything else (runtime, app, DB, etc). And there’s many blended models of both approaches. And it offers a lot of redundancy of choice on various things like databases, operating systems, containers, etc. It is extremely flexible and has a high level of granularity on how you set things up. It requires a lot training, admin overhead, budgeting, and monitoring. It’s expensive AF. And somehow they act like they are losing money, too, and laid a bunch of people off. Whatever, Amazon.
Azure is fairly similar to AWS in most respects, however it offers far less features and products (and is generally cheaper per hour). I have only messed around in Azure a little, I am not an expert in it by any means.
All 3 have certification programs, of course.
Taking a guess here that Salesforce tries to appeal to larger businesses that don’t want to get their hands very dirty managing many of the layers themselves. AWS and Azure market to businesses that need more flexibility and have a more complex mix of existing infrastructure.
As for Google cloud, I know zero about it other than the few things I personally use like Drive, etc.