> I’ve spent time in some of the largest distributed computing deployments

Yeah obviously if you run hundreds or thousands of severs then efficiency matters a lot, but then there isn't really the option to use a single machine with a lot of RAM instead, is there?

I'm talking about the typical BigCorp whose core business is something else than IT, like insurance, construction, mining, retail, whatever. Saving a single AKS cluster just doesn't move the needle.