Am I mistaken or is the only way to do a bare metal restore to download the image-based backup to an external drive, physically connect the drive to the server I want to restore, and then kick off the restore using the Windows installation media?

https://mspbackups.com/Admin/Help.aspx?c=Contents%2Fhelp_bare_metal.html

Seems like that's pretty inefficient? You have to wait for the full image to download, which could take a very long time, and then restore using this method. Other backup clients sometimes allow you to create a boot image that allows you to connect to your cloud backup and directly download the image while restoring...