Inefficiency also compounds. If you're sending too much data over an unreliable connection using a bloated protocol (say), you have three multipliers. Now start daisy-chaining these things together, host them on bloated images on pods in underpacked nodes in k8s (not a potshot at k8s, which I like quite a bit, just... another plausible source of inefficiency). Write all the servers in Python (or worse, some Ruby on Rails backed by MySQL or something comically underperformant).

We could keep going, but it maths out to mind-blowing amounts of waste just copying bytes around between buffers with no value add.

(Old man editorializing at clouds: "and all so we can employ people who don't know how computers work to satisfy corporate product pipelines by shoveling digital shit onto people that they neither want nor need")