Oh I agree, that's why I was careful to put "at scale" in there -- these types of approaches are typically good when you're still trying to understand your problem domain, and have not yet hit production scale.
But I've met many a customer that's spending 7-figures on a yearly basis on data that they have yet to extract value from. The rationale is typically "we don't know yet what parameters are important to the model we come up with later", but even then, you could do better than store everything in plaintext JSON on S3.
