All cloud providers I've tested will reject proxy cards, which are assigned from prepaid card pools. More businesses seem to be doing this as of late. It's rather unfortunate, since proxy cards are a fantastic fraud prevention device.
And don't forget that on top of exploitative practices, corporations frequently game the legal process too... like forcing customers to sign away their rights to sue in court, and all that.
Edit: one of many examples https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/02/automatic...
No, it's not, an even if it was, that would create no obligation of a vendor to let you use it to establish an account. The effect of legal tender comes when making an attempt to pay an existing debt, not when trying to establish a relationship in which charges might be incurred in the future.
Either laws are way too old for the current times or were made worse by lobbying groups in favour those with might.
Things don't seem to be getting better (cookie annoyance being one example) unfortunately.
If by contractual obligations you mean "clauses that are most probably illegal but the average person will usually just shut up and pay rather that lawyer-up against a multibillion corporation", then yes I can see how many, me included, just opt for one of those cards whenever possible.
Maybe if companies didn’t make cancellation processes so actively hostile to users or throw in mysterious charges that continue accruing for all eternity, people wouldn’t be so uncomfortable using their normal card?
If you hand your classic card details to a company like Oracle or AWS, your card isn't exposed to the same threats as when you use it to buy something at the gas station.
That's not true in my experience: I've been paying my GCP bill with debit cards from three different banks for years. (They were branded as VISA or Mastercard, mind you, but still debit cards.)
You do realize that letting people anonymously host whatever they want from reputable ASNs is a bad thing, right?