Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had a dime for every time I see a convoluted architecture in our code that only exists due to the arbitrary hard limits in AWS I'd be able to quit and never again worry about arbitrary AWS limits.
I'm pretty sure they aren't arbitrary at all and are mostly due to managed and serverless offerings backed by duct tape and chewing gum. On a few occasions I have been left with all-but-proof that behind the "let us handle scaling for you" smoke and mirrors is a bash script on an EC2 instance sized by guesswork and hardcoded until you complain, at which point support might be able to shuffle it between instance types…
Yes, it's part this and part "let's get rid of the noisy neighbour issue by making everyone whisper" design philosphy. This just arrogantly pushes the scaling challenges back down to the customers who are then forced to buy more AWS services to build workarounds for the scaling limitations in front of them. For Amazon it's a win-win though and they'll keep doing this as long as c-suite fools keep buying.