And employee’s salary is not a fixed cost? Or are you going to ask your employees to do double duty because “we are family and we are in this together”?

How many companies that were on such thin margins between surviving and going out of business that cutting infrastructure spending by 10 or 20% was going to make a difference in them being able to survive?

Yes, they are. But this is outside the point.

Which is, vendor locking did not show itself, because the economy was good.

Companies have been “locked-in” to vendors since IBM in the 50s. There are still plenty of successful companies that have been dependent on IBM for decades and weathered plenty of recessions. That’s not to mention all of the companies in the modern era that are completely “locked in” to the Microsoft ecosystem and spend literally millions on Windows, Sql Server, Active Directory, Office 365, etc. and have also weathered recessions.

Any large company depends on literally dozens of vendors that they have tied their business process into where it would be a major pain to switch.

I know in the health care industry, a lot of health systems are so tightly tied into their EMR/EHR, leaving a something like AWS would be a breeze.

Could it be large companies have war chests to draw on?

Smaller companies often run leaner. Except maybe for big airlines that spent their surpluses on stock buybacks and executive pay increases.

The clouds are designed for elasticity. Cutting costs there would be easier than some colo/on-prem environment which has much more contract lock-in.

Did you consider that AWS profits might be growing because everyone and their mom and their grandma are sitting on the Internet now?

Their profits are growing...their pricing isn't. AWS has yet to increase the price of any resource; they've only ever lowered them.