[bombcar]

The biggest "scam" if you can call it that is reducing all factors of CPU performance to "cores".

[zokier]

AWS is pretty transparent about what sort of cores you are exactly getting, and has different types available for different use-cases; typical example would something like r7iz that is aimed for peak single-threaded perf https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/r7iz/

[Nextgrid]

I'd argue the even bigger scam is charging for egress data transfer rather than just for the size of the pipe.