i am not sure why everyone (comments, this post, etc.) assume there is a one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, even this one that looks quite simple. companies have to align a few things, ranging from the skills of the current employees, hiring plans, investor/shareholder management, or how to make sure the CEO really gets that boat he really wants and deserves.

not all businesses are the same. businesses with fat contracts but few users won't have massive operating costs, and they can use whichever easy and non-scalable technology they want, because once the business scales up, those fat contracts will pay for enough data engineers. a gaming startup will face high server costs right away, without any optimisation, while data platforms (e.g. bigquery) with a tiny bit of optimisation (materialising 2-3 summary tables, for example) will bring the cost down to "laughable" pretty easily.

it is true that many of these things are choices, e.g. do you really want to spend a shit ton of money for looker when superset for most users is just as good? are you even able to make that choice? if these choices are hard to make because a potential user (or set of users) in the company really wants something instead of something else, well, that is not a technical choice, and the issue you have has nothing to do with the technology.