Companies (particularly young ones) succeed or fail if they are innovating on their products and delivering value to customers. Reducing cloud spend is not doing that.
It may very well improve the bottom line, but when the company is (correctly) more focused on “how do we increase our customers by X% this year”, pursuing those savings is a distraction.
Then you end up with BS like the ones described here https://www.the-investing-desk.com/cloud-costs-are-in-a-bubb... where to justify the fact that cloud is much more expensive managers start to throw random numbers vaguely justified just to show that cloud is actually better.
I saw similar things in Corporate world even when choosing a colo/service partner vs doing in-house... managers asking us detailed costs for infra needed (servers, network, licenses etc.) and when you were getting something like 30 in-house vs 100 hosted they just threw some random FTE count to support it to get to 110 vs 100.
I think there's a third, which is when the company is so rich it just doesn't matter. Then saving even a little bit of employee time (which are more likely to be the bottleneck in such a company) is worth basically infinite spend.
I worked at a place where they spent $6k/month on cloud, just for a Java app not doing much plus a PostgreSQL database. I came up with a way to save $2k/month (better indexes), when I did it nobody cared or even noticed I think. I know that $2k/month might not sound like much, but I think the same principle would have been true even if it'd been much more. They spent about $2m/year on an external software development agency to create a React project, full of inefficient scrum meetings and billable hours from project managers and so on, and they didn't really care about that either.