"Embrace, extend, extinguish". It was a Microsoft saying, but it explains Amazon's approach to Linux. Once your customers are skilled in how to do things on your platform, using your specialized products, they won't price-comparison (or compare in any other way) to competing options. Whether those countless other "half-arsed solutions" actually make money is beside the point; as long as the customer has baked at least one into their tech stack, they can't easily leave.

Likely the best comment in the thread: Microsoft couldnt kill Linux. But AWS did it by adding itself as a layer on top of Linux and literally taking control of the web that Linux liberated by taking over the entire server space in the mid-2000s.