At $0.045/hour, NAT gateways are expensive. This sets up perverse incentives, as it's cheaper to keep wasting public IPv4 addresses. If anyone from AWS is watching, I suggest that you make the base fixed price of NAT gateways way cheaper, and maybe add a small extra charge for EC2 instances and Fargate tasks with public IPs.

It’s $30 per month, which is not expensive and is gonna be a rounding error to most users.

You need one of those per AZ, and multiples of that if you split up projects across VPCs or AWS accounts.

AWS accounts and VPCs are free, so NAT gateways can form a significant part of the per-account/VPC base cost, which can be a significant part of your total cost for a small project/environment.

Yes, I get to pay AWS $30/month per VPC for immense privileged of accessing the internet from my cloud VPS.

The only problem with NAT gateways is that they are single-AZ. So if you're setting up multi-AZ in a VPC, you need one per AZ and you need the routing to be AZ specific.

If the NAT gateway was a service, then it could be multi-AZ transparent to the VPC.

This is probably dismissed by the "or pay AWS to do it" clause.