I have kind of the same personal experience - a couple of days answering questions about the scalability and resilience of a fictional web app and enterprise integrations.

I’m very much a generalist and kept to standards and terms not specific to AWS infra. They ”passed” me but wanted a follow-up after going through some training packages to make sure I could translate everything to AWS.

At the time I was leaving a bigger software company , largely because I felt we completely locked down customers in solutions perhaps not in their best interest - so this put me off.

I realized AWS would be just the same, just on a different level.

And of course this makes sense - they want to sell their stuff!

I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things.