This is a popular opinion but it simply fails to resonate to me.
"This company's software is so useful you can't help but use it because it saves you so much time, effort, and money" is NOT lock in.
You can absolutely choose to develop on AWS In a way that avoids lock-in (Containers, managed DB engines, other cloud storage providers have s3-compatible apis). People don't because it's more CONVENIENT not to - nobody is forcing the to.
Exactly. I currently host my side project on Digital Ocean, but before that I was on AWS and before that I was on Heroku. I'm considering a move to Azure in the future. And switching between these services costs me basically nothing in time and almost zero code.
I started on Heroku, switched to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Didn't much care for it so I switched to AWS EC2, running Dokku to replicate the Heroku experience. Simple database backup and restore with Postgres I manage myself. Switched to DO with the same setup with zero downtime. I expect Azure will be the same.
You create your own lock-in to save time and/or money. Those are business decisions like any other business decision. But in no way are any cloud providers forcing lock-in.
"This company's software is so useful you can't help but use it because it saves you so much time, effort, and money" is NOT lock in.
You can absolutely choose to develop on AWS In a way that avoids lock-in (Containers, managed DB engines, other cloud storage providers have s3-compatible apis). People don't because it's more CONVENIENT not to - nobody is forcing the to.