So if I’m “naively” assuming that you should be able to cite a real world case where a company needed more resources than AWS or Azure is willing to provide.

“Reasonable pricing” for any supplier that a company uses is a price where the company can pay their suppliers, do something to add value, and make a profit.

Cloud services are not designed for you. They are designed to make money for whomever actually owns them. They have their own architecture, assumptions and use cases.

Guess what? All of the suppliers you use for your business are in business to make money. And if your use case doesn’t fit within their managed services offerings, your escape hatch is to bring up a VM and install whatever you need on it.

In reality, the chances that a large company will eventually hit some limitation of AWS or Azure are nearly 100%

Where are the case studies?

The problem with "the cloud" is that a lot of the limits are no-obvious, and if your use case significantly deviates from whatever the provider had in mind, there might not be an incremental solution.

Every time I log on to AWS, and go to the support page, I see our account based limits. The non account specific limits are publicized. Which specific limits are you referring to?

As far as working around unknown limits of off the shelf managed services - that’s why companies hire programmers.

Another problem is that linear resource pricing is not always sustainable if you're experiencing exponential growth.

And if your marginal revenue is not exceeding your marginal costs, that says more about your business model than anything else.