> types of solutions engineers even consider

I think the issue is actually the opposite.

With the cloud, the engineers fail to see the actual cost of their inefficient scaled-out code, because someone else (the CFO) pays the bill; and the answer to any issue, is simply adding more "workers" and more "cloud", since they're basically "free" from the perspective of the employee. (And the more "cloud" something is, like, the serverless, the more "free", completely inverting the economics of making a profit on the service — when the CFO tells you that your AWS bill is too high, you move everything from the EC2 to AWS Lambda, since the salesperson from AWS tells you that serverless is far cheaper, only for the bill to get even higher, for reasons unknown, of course.)

Whom the cloud tax actually constrains are the entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs. If you have to pay $5000/mo to AWS just for the infra, you can only go so long without lots of revenue, and you'd need to have a whopping 5k/mo+ worth of revenue before breaking even. Yet with a $200/mo like at OVH or Hetzner, you can afford to let it grow at negligible cost to yourself, and it can basically start being profitable with the first few users.

Don't believe this? Look at the blog entries by the guy who bought Yahoo!'s Delicious, written before they went bankrupt and were up for sale. He was basically pointing out that the services have roughly the same number of users, and require the same engineering resources, yet one is being operated at a loss, whereas the other one makes a profit (guess which one, and guess why).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.pinboard.in

So, literally, the difference between the cloud and renting One Big Server, is making a loss and going out of business, and remaining in business and purchasing your underwater competitor for pennies on the dollar.