I think you're giving the worst-case scenario when citing large-scale cloud spend. A couple of hundred dollars a month for very fast builds is a good deal, and they can build on Intel and ARM, which is useful.
Worst case scenario, I mean, maybe? I don't have many data points. It does feel like cloud costs come up more often lately. I don't think there was anything particularly special about that company though. It felt like almost the default outcome of using modern development practices and giving everyone who "needed" it access to the Azure console.
