I doubt this is true. If you're operating a tech company anywhere in the world, I'm guessing $4K is pretty close to negligible. In whatever case, indexing by country is misleading, "tech companies" in general is more interesting, if there are a handful of tech companies in the third world for which this doesn't hold, it doesn't invalidate the generalization.

In SMB companies around the world "an occasional $4K charge" is definitely not negliable.

Again, we’re not talking about SMBs, we’re talking about tech companies generally. (What share of SMBs are there doing serverless or with any cloud footprint at all?)