The company I'm working for suffers from the same problem, but it's compounded by the fact that our IT is now almost 100% offshore. This means on top of having to wait for new VMs, we also have to fight a language barrier to explain what we need and why.

As a developer who has to wait weeks for instances that I could spin up myself in a day or less, and instead has to wait for literal weeks, I really don't see how this cuts costs. Perhaps, as you mentioned, it makes monitoring the systems easy, but for internal instances that have no internet access, how valuable is this?