In other words, when they "educate" young people about "The Cloud" and how is "The Best Way, the Only Way", they win because after a few years people got used to AWS as a fact of life and young professionals don't know how to administer a Linux box anymore.
The scale of the networks these companies are building is unlike any of the novice-level stuff companies like Hetzner deploy. As one example, in one region AWS has deployed 5 Pbps of inter-AZ fiber. They build all of their own SDN switches/routers, all the way down to the chips now, for maximum performance and configuration with the AWS API. And don't forget, they maintain a GLOBAL private network; companies like Hetzner or DigitalOcean just peer to the internet to connect their "regions".
I'll keep saying this on HN until people start listening: If you buy AWS then complain about price, you might as well go buy a Porsche then complain about the price as well. They're the best. Being the best is expensive.
I'm not buying a porsche and complaining about the price, I'm buying a car and complain it requires me to drive on roads made by the manufacturer and none of the parts are properly standardized and some things are expensive for no good reason.
Overall I'd say Azure is the only real competition to AWS as a product (where they are often the most willing to negotiate a big deal), but googles open source efforts potentially pose a risk.