the people buying these things obviously have no idea about that. Migrating to Okta or something else neutral would cost the same, but hey, that's a different name

not even remotely close. okta for an enterprise is big dollars. most shops already have o365, so the AAD premium tier licensing is already paid for. aad and okta workforce are almost feature parity.

You're right, but that's not what they meant (and it's not AAD's trajectory). Microsoft's been adding more and more device management, policies, software rollout, etc. to AAD to bring it up into equal standing with AD and then, eventually, allow most deployments to use just AAD, instead of holding some bulky AD setup of on-prem & cloud.