> can put thousands and thousands of dollars on your bill in less than an hour

By default a NGW is limited to 5Gbps https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/nat-gateway...

A GB transferred through a NGW is billed 0.05 USD

So, at continuous max transfer speed, it would take almost 9 hours to reach $1000

Assuming a setup in multi-AZ with three AZs, it's still 3 hours if you have messed so much that you can manage to max your three NGWs

I get your point but the scale is a bit more nuanced than "thousands and thousands of dollars on your bill in less than an hour"

The default limitations won't allow this.

That's a NAT gateway, but if you're pulling data for analysis from S3 buckets you don't have those limitations.

Let's say they decide to recalculate or test a algorithm: they do parallel data loading from the bucket(s), and they're pulling from the wrong endpoint or region, and off they go.

And maybe they're sending data back, so they double the transfer price. RDS Egress. EC2 Egress. Better keep good track of your cross region data!