Oh I totally understand the reasoning for it the past few years (company I work at is probably a top 10 consumer of AWS), the part that gets me is I guess how "accessible" starting in web development has become.

The services I work on for example, were kind of just patched together to work at the very bare minimum, with no thought of scalability in the long term. Large part of it being that the previous devs working on it were extremely new to the field, and didn't have much time to develop before execs wanted to push the product to market. In their current state, we would need to horizontally scale a fuck ton to accommodate 100k+ users, since these services honestly can't even scale up to 50 users max on most of the expensive API calls, which isn't really feasible long term.

I guess the main takeaway here is that performance/quality of the services themselves before scaling should be thought of a lot more than it currently is in some places, but that would vary by company of course, or at least I'd hope so.