The way it often works out is first you chose your provider because the interface is nicer, then your needs slowly grow, and at some point you you're blowing $1,000/mo on a given provider just because it had nicer interface a few years before.

Really? Because slack is IRC with a nicer UI. There are many examples of this.

Executives love slick UIs and flashy dashboards. Executives have a lot of power.

Should we be looking at Slack as an example here? Their interface is necessary for people to use it, if your company uses Slack you will have to use their UI/UX. Whereas for AWS, your engineers are more likely to make the call on UI/UX, and not the executives.

Are your executives launching servers? Do they care about their IDE's UI too?

Executives play with all kinds of tech and have all kinds of power.

What world do you live in that a random dev picks the cloud provider for a company?

I disagree with this, in my opinion slack has a lot of features on top of IRC (offline messages, webhooks, etc) that make it much more usable for its target audience.

Actually, in larger enterprises (or maybe this should be "non-startup stage companies") I find its actually often the exact opposite.

If we're profitable, we're going to invest in a better working experience so that our employees spend minimal time 'dealing with' a tool's 'issues'. -because we can.

If we're a smaller pre-profit/cash-strapped/VC-beholdened company everyone is going to be expected to tolerate working with 'rough' tools if it can save a few bucks.