It makes sense to use whatever $tech helps you get an MVP out asap and iterate on it. once you're sure you found gold, then it makes sense to optimize for scale. The only thing I guess one has to worry about when developing something like that, is to make sure good scalability is possible with some tinkering and efforts and not totally impossible.
So those savings are possible only if your devs are willing to leave the lock in of comfort
They saved $100k in the move or 2% of their engineering costs. And they're still very much on the cloud.
If you tell most organizations that they need to change everything to save 2% they'll tell you to go away. This place benefited because their previous system was badly designed and not because it's cloud.
By the way, 8 DevOps engineers with $150k/year cloud bill deserves to be highlighted here. This is a very high amount of staff dedicated to a relatively small infrastructure setup in an industry that keeps saying "cloud will manage that for you."
That's how I see most of these projects. You create a massively expensive infra because webscale, then 3 years down the road you (or someone else) gets to rebuild it 10x cheaper. You get to write two blog posts, one for using $tech and one for migrating off $tech. A line in the cv and a promotion.
But kudos for them for managing to stop the snowball and actually reverting course. Most places wouldn't dare because of sunken costs.