> I think it's not generally 'much better' to use alerts.

Anyone who says its 'much better' to use alerts instead of hard caps needs to Google 'alert fatigue'.

Alerts are soft. You ignore them or miss them, nothing happens except you spending $$$$$$$$$$ more.

Great if you're the cloud provider raking in the cash, but a poor way to run your infrastructure.

Hard caps force you to implement correctly (to control costs in the first place) and have correct monitoring in place (to keep a healthy cap buffer).

So it means you can't just vibecode some slop and blindly devops it via Github CI/CD. You actually need to think and reason about your infrastructure.