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The real question is why are people glaciering small files?

Tar everything and send it up. And then do an incremental backup

Amazon charges per operation, reduce the number of operations

My guess is they don't realise. AWS let's you setup lifecycle rules to archive S3 objects to Glacier automatically. It doesn't explicitly say it is cheaper (it says "this may reduce your costs"), but they probably just saw the headline prices for Glacier and moved everything.

Also, I would guess a lot of Glacier users are probably just slotting it in place of some other system that doesn't have the same pricing model.

If you write a AWS-native service that uses S3 as a back end (a very reasonable thing to do), it may create many small files in S3. It would be unreasonable to incur the costs to retrieve them and tar them up, and it also does not make cents to "click the box" to have them archived to glacier.

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