Anyway, getting caught up in specific remediations that could have prevented this is beside the point. For development you want a safe testing environment because mistakes, gaps, misunderstandings, bugs are a fundamental part of it. The entire point of tests and testing environments is to discover the problems you know exist but need to test to find.
But for the cloud operator, when somebody's runaway application results in a $15,000 bill that has to be paid, sure...
As to whether letting people's runaway things scale up infinitely is an intentional choice, I couldn't say.
Add to the long list of disappointments at humanity:
- Late fees were a big part of BlockBuster's business.
- Police departments factor traffic fines into their budget.
- Thousand other dark patterns that are unethical but not illegal.
In part 2 the author says "Had we chosen max-instances to be “2”, our costs would’ve been 500 times less. $72,000 bill would’ve been: $144". In other words, that $500 server is several times more expensive than it would have been if Firebase and GCP had saner defaults.