We're paid decent enough for SF bay startup salaries. Worldwide, regardless of where we live/work. This works out quite advantageously for having a distributed workforce, and means many folks earn very top of market for where they happen to live (if there is even a tech market where they live!)
Also, salary bands are transparent both to employees and applicants.
Amazon has made substantive contributions to OpenTelemetry. Which, I suppose increases consumption of AWS in a roundabout way by ensuring people will not have a crashy, buggy mess when scaling up microservices, but doesn't directly drive CloudWatch consumption (because CW is not a differentiating, big-revenue-driving product, and OTel doesn't lock you in)
AWS isn't offering steep discounts IMO, they're reflecting the true cost to run the processors in terms of cost of licencing the processor IP and the cost of the power/cooling the processors require. I suspect they are getting better margins on the Graviton line than on the conventional Intel/AMD chips even after giving the relative price discount.
Intel charges a much larger markup per chip than AWS can get from their own silicon + licensing ARM IP; the power consumption of Intel chips is also terrible (it's been cited that it's 60% lower power consumption for c7g instances compared to c6i instances, for instance, in the latest reinvent talk...) -- and power is what predominates operating cost day to day once the chip is fabbed/installed.
Intel looks less bad when you compare one physical core to one physical core, but AWS definitely will not sell you one physical Intel core for the price of one ARM core, they will sell you _half_ of one Intel core for 20% more than an ARM core.