I don’t remember watching either of these two movies so I have no skin in the game, but I love it when someone is this passionate about a controversial opinion like this.

You’re linking to the wrong status page item, the outage was totally unrelated to that maintenance. If you look at cloudflare maintenance history, they do that exact type of maintenance all the time.

Agreed, AWS make pricing deliberately difficult to control.

Check out budget actions, you can set that to stop EC2s on certain thresholds. Not perfects but can help. Also if you can use parameter store instead of secrets manager, you can save a bunch of money there too.