It seems like some of the situation is:
  "5g/mobile builds include a bunch more 'general machine' resources which offload a bunch of the work from what was dedicated appliances/etc."

Followed quickly by:
  "Well, we don't have the resources/etc to design/build/run/maintain that sort of thing in the field"

In a bunch of mobile deployments (in the US at least) a lot of the work was done by some vendor already, so swapping one vendor for another isn't particularly new.
   "Out with Nortel, in with Ericcsson!"

As to 'is this cloud?' or not, that's probably not super important? If the telco (as an example) could come to an agreement with ~bunches of local sysadmin shops

who'd all cooperate and build/deploy 'the same thing' (from the goes-into and goes-outof perspective) a price points which would be palatable. I imagine the telcos would have taken that direction.  Instead, they choose to minimize the number of contracts and options and get cookie-cutter deployments.

Folk may grate at 'aws' or 'azure' or 'gcp' ... but really the telco folk (the customer in this case) is choosing someone to run infra for them, under contract with what they hope are appropriate SLO/SLA and repair properties. It certainly behooves them to think about failure scenarios, but that's what SLO/SLA are for, right? :) and offloading the methods of repair/avoidance is part of the contract process.

-chris