I don't think 1) locking in customers via proprietary APIs 2) limiting supply of resources 3) auctioning off to the highest bidder among your locked in customers was entirely the core feature of clouds. Rather, the idea was "we'll charge so much margin you never need to worry about anything physical, another machine is just an API call away". You don't need to overprovision for peak times and there is less physical stuff on your balance sheet, ez cash flow, win win!

Of course now everyone realizes it's a big sham and neither Amazon nor Microsoft are stupid enough to spend a trillion capex on building the datacenters, fiber lines and so on you need to handle a temporary 700% pandemic situation. In a year from now, they don't want that stuff on their quarterly report just as companies going "cloud only" don't want it.