[peterwwillis]

Wildcards can be used to get around problems in managing access to resources in a multi-tenant environment. If you have 10 product teams, and they all serve different products under a single zone, you may need to grant them all access to modify your nameserver as well as be able to create their own certs at will, if they were going to do independent automated certs. But with a wildcard, you simply give them all the same cert and independently configure the nameserver to point the right records at the right ALBs, and now none of them have any access other than to just serve whatever request hits its ALB.