Not true. In the article remote hands refers to actual hours of maintenance performed ($640 for 4 hours). The cost of having a human on call to solve hardware problems is far higher than that.
There is no need to have anyone on call yourself to drive to the colo, since any decent colocation provider will have staff on-site 24/7 to perform any physical intervention required.
Part of that you pay through your colocation bill and part you pay by the hour (depending on your contract/provider).
Ideally one always has OOB (out of band) access to all devices to make sure one can always recover from any error, such as messing up firewall config or similar. But there are transactional network management tools that can automatically roll back changes in case one messes up.
But the colo techs can do pretty much anything you would do yourself.. Plenty of people run racks in locations they have never set foot into themselves..
