Hetzner has VPS servers. Has a web-based admin dashboard. Its API can create and teardown servers, virtual networks, block stores, load balancers, firewalls, DNS zones. It's similar to OVHCloud and Linode in my experience. If all these features are not sufficiently characteristic of clouds and abstractions, then I probably don't understand those two terms themselves.

Since "cloud" just means someone else's computer, I don't see how it doesn't qualify.

Hetzner is of the opinion that they have a cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Whether it has enough features to satisfy your needs is another question, but it is more than just bare metal or vps

Yes, we are very much of the opinion that we are a cloud provider. While historically we have been known for our dedicated servers, our Cloud continues to steadily grow in terms of feature set, users, infrastructure, and much more. We even updated our cloud offer today. --Katie, Hetzner

I mean basic features like auto scale and create new resources.

The most basic thing with a load balancer and scale instances behind that.

They don't have any of that.

They have load balancers, and while they don't have an auto scale feature they do have APIs for starting instances and configuring the load balancer. So it's not that difficult to build your own auto scaling

As compared to a "traditional" offering where there's only a manual order form and getting a new server might take hours, making auto-scaling unfeasible

Autoscaling based on CPU usage has been the most basic thing in the last 15 years. Are you really asking people to build that?

They have a cloud offering. Hourly billing instances with basic management features. They also have an S3 compatible storage service as part of it and a load balancer.

I mean it is not really "cloud" compared to larger ones, just a toy but they are building things now.