1) Doesn't Amazon charge for ingress and egress transit, and isn't this unusual, and isn't it more expensive that way? I could have swore I recently calculated AWS transit to be something like 20x the cost of that in a normal colo datacenter. Maybe there's something in AWS billing where this only comes into play when you cross certain technical boundaries, I don't know enough to say, but I'm thinking it would have to be something like that in order to "save a ton of money."

2) Contemporary site/app development renders the latency of individual requests irrelevant. The whole page is going to boop and bounce around for 20 seconds anyway, why make a big deal about it?

The web is a measurably worse experience now than it was 10 years ago (maybe even 5), so it's ironic that Goodhart's Law has led so many astray toward measuring smaller and smaller trees within a growing forest. "Well but we have to get the request for number of friends below 10ms" while the other 400 requests on the page are dilly-dallying and experiencing their own latencies. Then the CSS gets applied.