[hotpotamus]

I suppose my problem is that the enormous complexity paired with the utility billing feels like I'm trying to drink from a pool of water surrounded by enormous lurking predators (the 800-pound gorilla analogy seems apt). I think everyone has at least a story of a forgotten instance that billed them a bit more, but with "infinitely scalable" compute come infinitely scalable bills. There are instances of developers creating infinite loops in cloud functions that result in 6 figure AWS bills. Of course then the advice is to plead your case and hope for a credit, but I wouldn't expect everlasting benevolence from Bezos's machine.

I have other issues and could probably expound on them at length, but work to do and all that. I don't disagree with you that it's an important tool for engineers today (I've certainly got an account or two), but that doesn't mean I have to like it.