Most people who buy EC2 instances at scale won't want most of them to have persistent storage attached. Storage is handled by a DB or S3.
Its like we stopped the "cattle vs pets" metaphor a bit early and some people are mad that a butcher is selling steak instead of a whole cow.
(And just for the record, my team has pretty minimal AWS usage... we're not one of the cloud kool-aid shops. We buy overflow worker server capacity on EC2 spot instances, but our primary app stack runs completely on colo'd bare metal for our day to day operations. Even on our bare metal though... individual app/worker servers are disposable and persistence is provided elsewhere)