A few gigabytes of text is practically free to transfer even over the most exorbitant egress fee networks, but would cost “get finance approval” amounts of money to process even through a cheaper model.
It sounds like you already know what sales peoples incentives are. They don't care about the tiny players who wanna use tiny slices. I was referring to people who are trying to push PB through these. GCPs policies make a lot of sense if they are trying to get major players to switch their compute/data host to reduce overall costs.
I think it often comes down to who is responsible for making decisions with that data. If a product or business person is the one driving a feature, and looking for adoption, the engineers likely aren't going to be invested in building out sophisticated metrics. They get the metrics they are responsible for from their cloud provider (resource use/latency/scale).
I think that problem is compounded by the perception that these integrations are going to tank your products perf (may hurt the metrics engineers care about).
I think all of those dynamics change in really big companies with thousands of engineers. Then you can often end up in a situation where engineers are now required to maximize product metrics, and need visibility into their small slice of the pie.
So, I think its largely incentive, which is why I see all of the metrics vendors targeting product and sales people in small/mid sized companies.