They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.
You won't get any argument from me on that one, but it's worth remembering that it's also hard to find people who are able to run systems in the cloud cost effectively.
I believe this means they generated $500m for bytedance, but I can't find a good citation, bytedance itself generated $6B in profits though for the fiscal year 2022
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1342785/bytedance-key-qu...
No, but you're definitely dealing with the Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.