In my experience it's the individual contributors who are overly obsessed with being elegant and efficient in their use of machine time. Those who are conscious of the bigger picture tend to have a more accurate sense of the relative costs of machine time versus engineering effort.
Multiplying your datacenter bill by 10 because you couldn't be arsed to spend two days thinking about system architecture isn't an "accurate sense of the costs" in any universe, except the one where you're spending venture capital bucks and waiting to get quckly bought by a Google with more free money than they can count.