From this and the other comment, it looks like I wasn't clear about talking about SMB/ME rather than a seed/pre-seed startup, which I understand can be confusing given that we're on HN.

I can tell you that I've never seen a company run out of money from going cloud-first (sample size of over 200 that I worked with directly). I did see multiple businesses scale down their consumption to near-zero and ride out the pandemic.

The answer to scaling problems being unpleasant enough to put the business in danger is yes, but that was also during the pandemic when companies needed to make pivots to slightly different markets. Doing this was often unaffordable from an implementation cost perspective at the time when it had to happen. I've seen acquisitions fall through due to an inability to meet technical requirements because of stateful monstrosities. I've also seen top-line revenue get severely impacted when resource contention causes outages.

The only times I've seen 'cloud-native' truly backfire were when companies didn't have the technical experience to move forward with these initiatives in-house. There are a lot of partners in the cloud implementation ecosystem who will fleece you for everything you have. One such example was a k8s microservices shop with a single contract developer managing the infra and a partner doing the heavy lifting. The partner gave them the spiel on how cloud-native provides flexibility and allows for reduced opex and the customer was very into it. They stored images in a RDBMS. Their database costs were almost 10% of the company's operating expenses by the time the customer noticed that something was wrong.