> There's a class of tech-influencer who think they can dissect past decisions on a blog post without being in the room when the technical constraints were being laid out

The cost they are laying out are not that prohibitively expensive. I’ve known corporations where people spin up test clusters that cost 5K a month and forget about it. A business critical service can definitely ignore costs in the short term if they bring in customers. The standard practice is to just ship something quickly and optimize for the cost later if it helps bring in revenue/customers.

Besides, the napkin math isn’t always true. If you’re an enterprise customer for AWS, you get massive discounts, especially in the time frame they’re talking about. And when it comes to partnerships, I remember back in the day AWS used to let you do pretty much anything for free if it meant they could parade your project to other customers.