Generally I agree with what your saying, but

> I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs

An apples-to-apples comparison requires looking at all associated costs of switching to on prem (salaries, hardware, etc...).

I've only been a part of this analysis at a company dealing with a cloud bill in the low tens of millions, nowhere near the scale of Spotify (and I'm still relatively new to all of this).

> And cloud has a lot more lock-in than most employees.

It's a shame there are not better abstractions to facilitate moving to and fro.