AWS has some complicated features that they don't really explain well. In your case, you're talking about "Dedicated vCPU" having a $2/hr fee, and this was confusing to me because I don't recall this fee existing. It turns out they have two completely different offerings for dedicated hardware: Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances. The latter has the $2/hr fee, but I've only ever used the former which has no fee[1]. I'm still not exactly sure what the advantages are for the latter and why those advantages cost $2/hr.

1: When you use a Dedicated Host, you won't see a "fee" on your bill, but you are charged more. As an example, in us-east-1, an m5 Dedicated Host costs 10% more than a m5.metal AKA m5.24xlarge. It's about $0.40/hr more expensive. You'd think it would get cheaper since you're buying in bulk, but I can understand this actually maybe is not preferable for AWS because it is difficult to find a completely unused server on demand.