I'm not making an argument against the cloud here. Not saying you should move out. The reason why I call out cloud infrastructure specifically is because of how easy it is to let the costs get away from you in the cloud. This is a common thread in every company that uses the cloud. There is a huge amount of waste. And this company's story isn't different.

By the way, 8 DevOps engineers with $150k/year cloud bill deserves to be highlighted here. This is a very high amount of staff dedicated to a relatively small infrastructure setup in an industry that keeps saying "cloud will manage that for you."