Most places outside tech hubs put massive emphasis upon being able to swap labor and are technology laggards because their switching costs are so high due to lack of velocity in their work in technology in the first place (and also why waterfall or spiral makes more sense for their efforts rather than Agile probably even today). The irony here is that strong AWS professionals are not cheap in any way, but neither is being dead in the water because your 60+ year old guru graybeard IT guy that managed the racks faithfully for 12+ years retires suddenly.
And yet they're handing out $25k-$100k in credits like candy to startups to prevent them from going to Google cloud or Azure.
Another tell is that the ways to "prove" start-up status under most of the big providers' terms for cloud credit align more around "did you get VC funding?" than "are you small?" due to the longer lead time nature of bootstrapped start-ups. Most don't give you credits if you've been around 2+ years and soured on another provider. Maybe I just sucked at it but I was bootstrapping before and had trouble getting decent credit then.
The biggest issue is not that people want to avoid internal IT and/or want elasticity, but the number of people who never even do a proper cost comparison beyond the top tier most expensive providers.