That is the business model and one of the figurative moats: easy to onboard, hard/expensive (relative to on-boarding ) to divest.

Though important to note in this specific case was a misconfiguration that is easy to make/not understand in the data was not intended to leave AWS services (and thus should be free) but due to using the NAT gateway, data did leave the AWS nest and was charged at a higher data rate per GB than if just pulling everything straight out of S3/EC2 by about an order of magnitude (generally speaking YMMV depending on region, requests, total size, if it's an expedited archival retrieval etc etc)

So this is an atypical case, doesn't usually cost $1000 to pull 20TB out of AWS. Still this is an easy mistake to make.