There’s a particular kind of learned helplessness that settles into engineering organizations after a few years of rapid cloud growth. You ship a feature. The feature works. Latency looks fine, error rates stay quiet, on-call doesn’t page. Then three weeks later someone from finance drops a Slack message — a screenshot of the AWS Cost Explorer with a jagged upward spike, annotated with a red arrow and a question mark. By then, the deployment that caused it has been buried under six more deploys. The engineer who wrote the change is mentally two features ahead. Nobody remembers. You run a postmortem on nothing.
This is the default state for most shops. Not negligence, exactly. More like a structural information deficit: the feedback loop between code change and cost impact is measured in billing cycles, not seconds.