Yeah, I guess it probably is some sort of criteria that requires a formal request? The resource under that number might be automatically provisioned via "freebie quota" per team. I don't work for Meta but I believe most of the big techs work in a similar way.
Curious - do you know what he could have been referring to? SRE position, 6-8 years ago.
A bit before my time, but maybe a physical capacity order, to a non fungible pool. The infra is quite different now (mostly to avoid this kind of inefficiency)