Your claim that the cloud can lose data because of hard drive failure is ridiculous.

Yes, that was a simplification of the reality that the data exists in storage somewhere. Killing one drive shouldn’t cause the data to be destroyed, but if you killed enough of their data centers, eventually you would see data loss.

Services are setup to automatically spin up more resources as needed.

Eventually, you can find a load large enough overwhelm these services. My point really was that theoretically you could overwhelm the system, but that it is unlikely to happen.

YouTube is owned by Google. Google is a cloud provider. Therefore YouTube is hosted on its own cloud.

That’s a bit of a cop-out. I guess I should have said “in a cloud that isn’t self-hosted”. Like yeah if I build my own cloud then I trivially control my data, but that’s usually not the case.

You do not understand how any of this works.

Well I’m not in the IT department but I do have a baseline understanding of how cloud computing works. Your data has to “live” somewhere, possibly multiple “somewheres”. If you compromise all the “somewheres”, or at least the locations of the desired data in the “somewheres”, the data is gone.