OK, now I see. I got certified a couple years ago and seem like they introduced this pricing past year.

So "...you are not charged for static external IP addresses that are assigned to forwarding rules", yes, but a VM is not a forwarding rule :P

So you gotta pay for external IPs attached to a VM, but not to a Load Balancer. Seems like they're trying to incentivize using LBs to use less IP addresses, I guess...