I've lost track of the times I've heard "compute is cheap! engineers are expensive!" Except... that compute cost will live forever. The time it takes someone to debug a bad loop or poor query is at worst a one time cost. Longer term, it may even make other stuff faster in the future.
And then you'll get responses like "pfft.... that's hardly the cost of one part time FAANG person who makes $680k/year - what's the point?"
And around we go...
It also means less engineers are needed for most companies.
It's not cheaper, it's just more opaque.
Back when your service was deployed on that 2 CPU box and it was too slow for obvious reasons, you optimized it and then it was good.
Today you just shrug and increase that kubernetes cluster from 16 to 48 nodes and forget about it. Costs a lot but the bill shows up somewhere else, in most groups the engineer doesn't even know what it is.
Sometimes management is correct in that decision, sometimes it is "penny wise, pound foolish".
"Back in the olden days", if your product was slow but the number of CPUs was fixed (or could not be increased instantly), the solution was to go and fix your code.
Basic system level skills are now no longer taught or practiced at the appropriate levels, so teams end up without engineers who actually know how to profile and optimize.
The cloud providers are the big winners here.