Creating POPs is not as trivial as creating a Heroku or Render like service on top of public clouds. While there are EC2s and public cloud VMs in various geographically distributed locations around the world, the instances in the actual POP regions are usually inaccessible.

Example:

- AWS has 25 regions [0]

- AWS CloudFront has 225 POP regions [1]

Partnering with Equinix/etc. and other ISPs to establish more POPs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Unless the CDN has a good edge-close-to-cities presence and a high number of those, users will generally not see value in the CDN.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/?nc=sn&loc=2&what...