Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did not use an NLB because it is expensive in its pricing model for TLS connections (and we prefer to let AWS terminate TLS). For 20 million connections, an NLB would cost $28,800/month. It's drastically cheaper to use an ELB, provided you can talk to AWS to have them scale it for you.
Is it drastically cheaper to use an NLB without letting AWS terminate TLS? I thought AWS was expensive for TLS termination, generally, unless you need the client locality for lower latency.
Terminating TLS yourself incurs some CPU cost and a bit more memory cost. How much CPU/memory is eaten depends on the efficiency of your code. Our Rust implementation roughly matches C code efficiency, so we could handle terminating TLS ourselves if ELB stops being feasible at some point.