Ok but we're in a thread about Ubers cloud bills, which are probably well into the 9 figures annually. It definitely gets talked about in board meetings.

Global public cloud spend is hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I wouldn't be surprised if it's AWS's marketing team that came up with the talking point about how much more expensive developer time is.

Edit: put this another way- wherever you work, you might know what parts of the architecture need some performance work but do you know what parts of the architecture cost the most money?

A couple of years ago, I optimize some shit and reduced the annual billing of 150k€/y, for a 3 days of work

I might say, "hardware" is expensive compared to (my) salary :)

It might take an engineer with no prior RDBMS knowledge a quarter to be able to optimize a DB for their use case, but then it’s effectively free. You found the optimal parameters to use for writer nodes? Great, roll that out to the fleet.