I totally agree with you. I run the data science department at a corporation and we do most things on our laptops (I have a mobile workstation) or on our in-house server. Most data science teams seem to be moving to cloud. We've saved a lot of money and awkward conversations with accounting about why we're using so much computing power for so many hours a day. I don't bat an eye at running something overnight that has a high chance of failing.

Back to the topic at hand, Parler dedicated itself to being a place where people could say alt-right things. How did they not price in the risk of getting booted by AWS? Even estimating a 5% chance should have convinced them to self-host.