I've seen this over and over with cloud projects. People absolutely get promoted/raises based on optimising/cutting cloud budget. So there's no incentive in doing things efficiently from the start. You're much better off to build a vastly (but maybe not obviously) inefficient first version and then go back later and show how you "saved" the company tons of money by turning off a bunch of unused services etc. It's harder to hide racks of powered off servers which is why this is so prevalent in the cloud.