Perhaps in some distros, but not so much elsewhere.
> Do you need to touch AWS infrastructure from the same account, host, vm as you read email or surf the web?
In short: Yes.
> do these environments need full, direct internet access?
Not sure what you mean by the environment, but in general, yeah - a whole bunch of tooling these days is basically unusable without internet access.
Perhaps in some distros, but not so much elsewhere.
> Do you need to touch AWS infrastructure from the same account, host, vm as you read email or surf the web?
In short: Yes.
> do these environments need full, direct internet access?
Not sure what you mean by the environment, but in general, yeah - a whole bunch of tooling these days is basically unusable without internet access.