If given an option between a job maintaining cloud services and a job maintaining on-premises technologies, I'd take the latter every time. You spend less time fighting support ticket queues and more time doing things.

That's OK for learning general things and the software but jobs tend to use AWS.

Sure, so, you'll want to use some AWS (much of which can be within free tier), some of your homelab with CloudStack, etc., and some Terraform (etc.), and learn heterogenous hybrid cloud.

Using a homelab for learning isn't somehow mutually exclusive with having your own AWS account for learning.