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It's not. You generally only pay for the master clusters with no per-node costs over whatever instance type you are using and scheduling class (ondemand, reserved, spot, etc).

So not only are the masters relatively cheap, they cost is amortized over the cluster size.

AWS is probably very unhappy about this but they were forced into this by GKE pricing model. Google pushed people to adopt k8s not because they can make a lot of money from people using it but because they can take away a lot of money from AWS and increase workload portability, which benefits Google far more than AWS as they are in second place.

The most expensive managed services are things like RDS, MSK, Elasticache, etc. MSK in particular is pretty egregious with a 80% premium considering they haven't done any additional engineering like RDS.