As far as I noticed, ping with a spoofed source address is the only actual abuse mentioned in the article. It should go without saying that you can't tell if a spoofed ping packet came from AWS, because the source address is the address the spoofer wants you to send a reply to, not the spoofer's address. And a much less invasive mitigation would be rate-limiting pings to, say, 10 per second.
While the Internet is becoming balkanized this is mostly because of social media siloing itself to generate advertising and data revenue and to extract profit from AI training data (e.g. the Reddit/Google exclusivity deal) rather than because of providers blocking IP ranges.
I certainly don't understand the rational mindset behind blocking certain providers over some pings and then complaining about IP connectivity becoming balkanized. The balkanization is caused by the ones doing the blocking.