They give potentially worse pricing on a lot of the basic things (egress bandwidth, basic VM hosting, storage pricing) because their real value-add are all the extra managed services they offer on top of those things, the scale they're able to offer, and the more enterprise features.

If you're using AWS/GCP/Azure to just host a couple of VMs for a small group you're massively overpaying.

The last comparison I did was Hetzner offers 14x the performance per dollar

Not including the faster SSD & included traffic

I haven't been professionally involved in AWS in some time, and never was involved in pricing.

Personally, the only thing I know of that is a true deal vs. competition is cold storage of data. Using the s3 glacier tiers for long term data that is saved solely for emergencies is really cheap, something like $1/100GB a month or less.

AWS is usually not the cheapest EVER when it comes to offerings like EC2. If you aren't doing cloud-native or serverless at AWS, you're probably spending too much.

Quite the opposite. They have mindshare lock–in and don't face competitive pressure to reduce prices. AWS boasts it never increased prices but it also never reduced them by much, even as hardware got an order of magnitude cheaper.

They might be if they were trying to compete on price. But my understanding is their margins are... healthy shall we say.

They're selling all their capabilities; using them as a VPS is like using a battleship to cut cheese.

But if all you really do with cloud stuff is "ssh into a server I have" (which covers a ton!) then you'll find much cheaper/more performant elsewhere.

AWS outbound data is as much as 75x the cost of eg Hetzner.

I view a large percentage of "cloud" usage like Teslas stock price: it's completely detached from reality by people who have drunk the kool aid and can't get out.

They don't. AWS is the most expensive hosting provider in the world.