Shitty sysadmin

The biggest reason I think is SLAs and the ability to blame someone else when something goes wrong. I've seen it play out at multiple different companies now.

If it convinces the beancounters and management to accept it, it's a win.

I think that’s called fog

Marketing works, and executives aren't that smart

Well there is a distinction. If the on prem hardware is running a cloud stack, which hosts all the actual stuff the company wants, then it's on-prem cloud. The purpose of this is usually to make infra management more infra-as-code friendly, and keep most of the benefits of cloud (convenience mostly) with less cost. Of course it requires hiring people who know how all of that works, something you get "included in the cost" when you pay for off-prem cloud.

Unless you're paying someone run hybrid cloud for you (IBM and other so this), but that's usually for sensitive data or if all your users are in house and sending data to the cloud just to get it right back doesn't make financial sense.

Qualcomm bought VM ware after Dell spit it out.

They proceeded to basically jack the price and otherwise alienate much of the user base. In a world where AWS is a thing, you saw a lot of companies walk, and there was a general lamentation for enterprise on-prem virtualization options.