Counterpoint: my org got a large credit pool, but out development and engineering team were closely communicating with relevant leadership to explain costs and processes. We stretched out the credits for 3 years, despite spinning up/down nearly a hundred thousand VMs. Our infrastructure team still controlled access and setup, but it was a lot easier to say "director, Bob wants $200/month for this project, approved?" Then it was created in a way the costs tank to that project. Slower than Bob with direct access, but much faster than traditional systems since the VM is up in minutes and could be put in a sandbox if needed.

So in our case, credits got us into AWS, but instead of treating it like free money, we spent a lot of time improving efficiency and reducing our bill so when the credits ran out we could run our system for an affordable rate.

I take pride in reducing costs in the cloud. I don't argue cloud is the only way, but there's a lot of use cases where it just makes sense -- CloudFront+S3 for static websites, for example.