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I don't understand the "cloud is someone else's computer" argument at all to be honest. How many companies of Unisuper's size had catastrophic data failures before "the cloud"? Probably more than one!
And as to the application of the question to the personal data storage level, it seems beyond question that for the vast majority of people, their data is more secure (in the sense of preserved from accidental loss) in Google/Microsoft/Apple's hands than if they had to manage their own backups. Maybe a cloud provider loses data for one in a thousand customers, but I suspect that every single person who managed significant amounts of personal data in the days before the cloud lost data at some point due to negligence or mishap.
There's been more than one cloud provider data failure, but yes, it's absolutely true that the average cloud provider (even including the bad ones!) on average are better than the average end user (even excluding the very bad ones).
My argument is more against the framework where the Cloud solves the problem, either entirely or to such a degree that end users don't really need to consider it. That might seem like a strawman -- everybody talks versioning and backup! -- but Actual Professional Standards often difference between centralized and decentralized backup approaches, people colloquially treat the 3-2-1 rule as solved by using different regions or services on a single provider (or worse a locally synced version) for 'media', and I've seen no small number of mid-sized deployments that have bought into it hook, line, and sinker. AWS in particular has a whole spectrum of (weirdly price and provisioned) services Just For being your all-in-one backup solution. There have been IT people responding to this incident as though Unisuper recovered its data thanks to help from Google, rather than a secondary provider.
That's not a Cloud-specific problem. People could -- and people did and do! -- leave all your backup drives plugged in and spinning at the same computer with your live copy, running in your personal server closet. But you could (and would) get slapped in any credible audit.
I think Cloud makes this particularly dangerous because the actual processes and ownership are often obscured or multilayered, at the same time that an increasingly few baskets have increasingly large portions of the eggs. As a business, if you don't investigate close enough, you can find out that your 'multiregion' is really just two sides of the same data center. As an enterprise user, if you don't watch your e-mails, you can find that your data is gone even if the actual hardware owner knows what they were doing. ((And along those lines, the "accidental" in "accidental loss" is some work, here: Google either lost 0% or 100% of Album Archive, depending on how you look at it.)) As a personal user, you can find out that wildly-different subscriptions all use the same (sometimes intermediate) provider.
I guess my point isn't to say that Cloud is bad, but that the Cloud isn't magic, even if it looks close enough for most people that they've stopped thinking about the matter. If you're going to use a cloud-style approach, a single account at a single provider can't be the end-all be-all for any seriously critical data. It's better than just storing your one live copy -- but better than nothing is not a complete and balanced solution. And this incident should put anyone in that sphere on notice.
((And for the broader theme for this roundup, sleep-walking into disaster because someone else will solve your problems for you runs into problems, even at a level where the 'someone else' is either Google or the Aussie regulatory system.))
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The purpose of this phrase, from my mind, is to reinforce that "cloud" is nothing magical, special, or unknowable. It's just another computer, somewhere else, that you pay someone to run on your behalf.
If that's the purpose then I would say that it is essentially a lie. When your data is stored with a major cloud provider, it is not just on some computer similar to yours somewhere, it is replicated in enterprise grade data centers across multiple geos and there is a rotation of highly paid engineers on call if anything goes wrong with it.
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