Right; but it doesn't change the fact that any company capable of operating technical infrastructure at scale (aka any company with compute/storage needs above

Right; but it doesn't change the fact that any company capable of operating technical infrastructure at scale (aka any company with compute/storage needs above a half-dozen long rows of racks at a datacenter) can do it for about 60% of what it would cost on AWS. AWS is still a huge boon to startups from a cash flow perspective - it's like leasing equipment rather than buying it, except you're also leasing a very small fraction of all the folks you need to build/operate the equipment. It's also very cheap compared to trying to build and run the infrastructure yourself at small scale. And don't kid yourself -- you still need SREs in AWS. They're working on different issues, but AWS introduces as many issues in an SRE's scope as it removes.