we have on-prem with heavy spikes (our batch workload can utilize the 20TB of memory in the cluster easily) and we just don't care much and add 10% every year to the hardware requested. Compared to employing people or paying other vendors (relational databases with many TB-sized tables...) this is just irrelevant.

Sadly devs are incentivized by that and going towards the cloud might be a fun story. Given the environment I hope they scrap the effort sooner rather than later, buy some Oxide systems for the people who need to iterate faster than the usual process of getting a VM and replace/reuse the 10% of the company occupied with the cloud (mind you: no real workload runs there yet...) to actually improve local processes...