As the author points out AWS can provide a few things that you wouldn’t want to try and replicate (like CloudFront) but for most other things you’re very much correct. AWS is ultimately very expensive for what it is. The complicated billing that’s full of surprises also makes cost management a head-banging experience.
Fair, though using AWS solely for CloudFront would mean you should compare to Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, etc. I'm not sure if the value prop for it looks so great if you don't include the "integrated with your other AWS stuff" benefit.
Agree, CloudFront isn’t super competitive with CDN focused vendors. It’s basically the “well you’re already on AWS so may as well just use this” play.
I mean, AWS egress is so expensive that I'd put something else in front of it for anyone who has any decent amount of traffic.