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I've never understood why AWS charges so much for network traffic, especially considering their connectivity and peering.

Can you actually use that traffic though? I can run AWS bandwidth at max for the entire month and (assuming I'm not spamming or whatever) I just get a bigger bill.

With places like Hetzner you may be shut down for abusing their services if you use that limit too frequently.

nah, wrong. If you go over the allowed bandwith, you can get either limited to 10Mbit/s or pay 1,37€ per TB. In comparison, this is pretty cheap, but that is about waht you pay, when you buy transit. Source: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en

correction, 1,17€/TB

Simple, Hetzner directly buys at transit wholesale prices.

Amazon peers extensively, so they don't even pay for (most of) the traffic!

(Not on a recurring basis anyways -- yes, there's the one-time capital costs and such.)

Peering has recurring costs too, it's just not going to the other peer (generally), the recurring costs are for things like space at the exchange, exchange fees for dedicated circuits to the peer, etc.