AWS offers $100k for a year if you've raised some funds, and I saw that Azure is offering $150k pre-funding (I don't know if or what the time limit is on the Azure credits). I'm sure GCP offers something similar, though I don't know the details.
These are huge, and a smart startup could quite easily leverage these to skip an entire funding round (with some amount of luck). I'm not sure if you can daisy-chain these offers, but if you can, a quarter of a million dollars saved on engineering infrastructure cost is pretty much the polar opposite of "making life tough for startups".
You might note use the full amount of credits, but if you've found a product/market fit (and if you haven't after the first year, that may be it's own sign), and you've not been particularly cautious about your code's efficiency, $100k is a godsend, at least insofar as you not having to actually fork over cash for your missteps in the first year.
I don't know if those programs were offered when this article is written, but they're offered now so the title is no longer true.