I think the market for Oracle Cloud is the same for early GCP: companies with large enough needs and strong enough engineering teams that they can leverage "X runs on Oracle Cloud" into deep discounts. And then cover the gaps with engineering.

A company I worked at knowingly bought very sub-par oracle products just to get discounts on the Oracle ERP and DB stuff.

Partially. It's basically only enterprise and upper market organizations that were hit by billing re-negotiations by AWS, GCP, or Azure and want a high touch experience.