I've maintained mac mini farms and it is both time consuming and expensive. If it were reasonable to setup and maintain Macs for devops, these offerings probably wouldn't exist.
They would still exist. When a company's entire shop is set up in AWS they want to keep it that way, not buy physical hardware to install in their office, create a VPN to make build pipelines, worry about physical security, etc.
Yeah, the premium here would be easily justified for us in having a mac colocated with the rest of our infra and it being easy to provision and manage through CloudFormation/APIs just like the rest of our infrastructure.
