In meteorology, clouds are also physical objects with a size and a weight and a limited lifespan that are subject to the vagaries of nature and time? It seems like a fine metaphor?

And again, the Internet is not something that you just evaporate water into; it's not a cloud. It's a series of tubes.

Err... A decade or two late on that realisation there buddy.

can’t read the article but does the author suggest an alternative? bit silly to complain without that.

This article has almost nothing to say. It's a bit like writing an article saying: "The water that comes out of your tap doesn't just magically appear through an interdimensional portal. It actually relies on a whole infrastructure of water treatment plants, reservoirs, pumps and pipes. Sometimes a pipe springs a leak and actual real living breathing people have to go and fix it."

Yeah thanks, what are you actually trying to say? Nothing? Ok.

The cloud is other peoples computers. Shocker. The mechanism by which we lose computational agency. Those datacenters, even if they're not being used to take all jobs (didn't fly, yet) are great at monitoring video feeds and killing home (personal) computing, can't afford RAM, here's a compute subscription forever.

Interesting.

The cloud is a great metaphor. It represents all that software that we expect to just "be there", without any thought to where it might be. Of course software needs a platform to run on, but it is designed so it doesn't matter where it is run. Your phone just finds it. It couldn't care less where the server is, it just connects, and you get your cat pictures, as long as you are connected to the Internet.

The physical manifestation of the cloud is all those servers in datacenters, with redundant connectivity and power, designed to run and be connected 24/7/365.26 . They are designed with failures and redundancy in mind. It can take a literal act of war to get a datacenter off the network permanently. And even then, when local data and connectivity are lost, people running Web services for real should be backing their data up offsite and designing their services to easily spin up elsewhere. Some services hosted in those datacenters simply had a brief outage while other resources were provisioned.

"The Cloud" is really just a series of Best Practices for software design and operations so that these services can run anywhere. Of course, they have to run somewhere, but they can run anywhere....

It's not a metaphor. It's a completely abused technical term. Network engineer use a cloud symbol for servers not on prem and say that those servers are "in the cloud". Then marketing overheard that the rest is history.