Don't get me wrong, most corporate IT is deeply incompetent at their core job. It's just that you can't fix the deep problems by outsourcing the computer part.
There's this great thing about BOA-sized support contracts where you get to call up the senior product managers and demand that they build the features that you want. And if you're not happy about something, engineers will drop what they're working on to appease you.
I wonder how many customers were interested in setting up a Custom Keystore for KMS on CloudHSM?
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/are-kms-custom-key-sto...
Of course, for small or medium customers whose finger snaps are ignored... WYSIWYG. The roadblocks in not-your cloud are still your roadblocks.
But (in a vacuum) when developing a solution to serve diverse needs and stakeholders, the HiPPO effect is definitely an anti-pattern.
With CSPs, at least you have four major players (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, ?IBM?) competing prices downward and multiple theoretical options. Yes, you have your in-house CSP expert biasing things, but since most of the work is external, at least you dont have a heavy internal weight on a home-built choice.
IMHO, the better option would be a CSP-agnostic Kubernetes based layer. But IMHO we're not there yet.
I've been at multiple Fortune 50 companies at multiple levels. Many times these types of infrastructure building are just forms of empire building and an attempt to embed ones' services in the organization at a very deep level. You convert one set of costs (AWS/GCP/Azure bills) for another set of costs (Infrastructure + Payroll). You also convert one set of headaches (CSP overcharging/auditing) for another (prima donna internal infra engineers.)