This is a myth, created so cloud providers can sell more, and so those who overpay can feel better. I've been using dedicated servers since 2005, so for 20 years across different providers. I have machines at these providers with 1000-1300 days of uptime.
Same here, been running dedicated servers with OVH since 2009, if anything bare metal server are more stable than before. I just replaced a set of servers that was from 2018, I didn’t have any hardware problems during their 8 years of working under significant load. During that time I had 2 or 3 power outages, a few more network outages. Usually problems come in a cluster. I had a few years that I had nothing to report, 100% uptime. Dedicated are nice, but I guess it scares people. Hetzner use lower hardware quality than OVH on some of their offerings, so your experience may vary. One of the most important thing is to check that your server use datacenter SSD/HDD with ECC ram, it saves you a lot of problems.
Most of them run Debian (some have Windows VMs running on those Debian machines), while a minority use Ubuntu. I reboot them once every few years when I upgrade the OS, kernel, or migrate to newer machine types.
I run most of the workloads in containers, but there are also some VMs (mostly Windows) and some workloads use Firecracker micro vms in containers.
A small number of machines are rebooted more often because they occasionally need new kernel features, and their workloads aren't VM friendly, so they run on bare metal.
This is a myth, created so cloud providers can sell more, and so those who overpay can feel better. I've been using dedicated servers since 2005, so for 20 years across different providers. I have machines at these providers with 1000-1300 days of uptime.