This sounds straightforward but you're glossing over a lot of second order effects. Notably, if this idea dominates your attitude you'll be much more likely to

This sounds straightforward but you're glossing over a lot of second order effects. Notably, if this idea dominates your attitude you'll be much more likely to miss the cases where a bit of judicious optimization actually would save substantially more in hardware costs. And it may not be 1k of hardware costs, but hundreds of k per year of cloud compute costs, depending on the situation.