So not to totally contradict, but when this was happening, I was at AWS in management in its largest revenue business (EC2), and while cost was never an afterthought, management worked hard to prevent most engineers from having to be overly concerned with this vs the other major engineering tradeoff factors (features, reliability, engineering time). i.e. we would give constraints at the "cost" level, but they were abstract, more in terms of moving forwards from existing solutions.

In particular, there was a strong understanding that engineers would overfocus on optimizing for what was asked, and so the deliberate overfocus was on "thinking big" on products that could grow rapidly while having pricing and engineering models that may be neutral margin in the short term; only in the long term paying off as positive margin (without needing to "surprise" customers with a price change).