Or you could just write conventional software. But I get it, you don't get resume points nor invites to cloud-provider conferences for that.

> Basically free staging environment. [emphasis mine]

Not really. Sure, the cost would usually be peanuts... until you have an infinite loop that recursively calls more lambdas. Then you have a huge bill (but hey that pays for your invites to their conferences, so maybe it's a blessing in disguise?). And yes, you will pretty much always get it refunded, but it's still a hassle and something that is absolutely not necessary.

Snark aside, having an opaque dev environment always constrained by bandwidth and latency that can’t be trivially backed up/duplicated is a terrible idea and why I always recommend against “serverless”, even besides the cost concerns.

Serverless is OK for small, fully self contained pieces or code that are fire and forget. But for anything complex that’s likely to require maintenance, no thanks.