You're right in the sense that the role was always awkwardly jammed into teams often when it didn't make sense.
Some were pretty good but most were of the certificate-chasing type that had bought into the commercialization (bastardization) of Agile.
Give C1 their due though. They dragged the entire company into AWS, mostly, which is something I don't think any other bank that's been around as long as they have has done.
And why/how is that a good thing?
From a business perspective it takes you out of the business of managing your own infrastructure. Even at big tech now we have to decide between managing our own infrastructure and “outsourcing” it to a managed service. Most advice I’ve gotten encourages the latter. It can cost more but if cost isn’t prohibitive it frees you up to deliver features and value for customers because you no longer have to develop (as much) expertise in ops.
However, once you move the companies infra to AWS (or any one cloud provider) and shutdown your infra, in due course AWS will keep increasing your price by x% every year. At the point you don't have a choice but to pay those price increases yoy. You have much less bargaining power.
I think hybrid cloud is the best way to go. You have lot of bargaining power and no one provider can hold you hostage.
I think you’re leaving out a key restraint: AWS is quite profitable now but has strong competitors and there’s still a much larger amount of IT spending which isn’t going to any cloud provider. If they abuse one customer, a ton of money is going to race to the exit. It’s also hard to see how they could raise prices enough to cancel out all of that lost future business without attracting regulatory attention, too — rearchitecting isn’t trivial but you’re still talking on the order of a year to profit before you’re not only losing the profits you had but also all of the future growth.
The other thing to consider is the substantially greater cost of a hybrid cloud: not just the obvious costs of extra resources, ops, security, training, application support, etc. but also the opportunity costs of restricting your usage to the lowest-common denominator cloud features. That’s a heavy cost to pay every month as a hedge against a low-probability event — I highly doubt that you’d lose money betting that you’d save so much money by using a single cloud that you’d still come out ahead if you had to migrate later.
And that doesn’t even get into the technical side of it, which is a logistical nightmare as you mentioned with multicloud. (I don’t even want to think about it for my personal projects!) If C1 has around 50k years of AWS experience among all its tech employees, it will take a long time to match that in Azure or GCP.
When the market is closer to saturation that could change but I think that’s going to hold for at least a decade or two: there is considerably more money being spent on traditional data centers than in the cloud and I’m sure they’re trying to give as few disincentives as possible to those potential customers.