(If it is then damn, I've been leaving a ton of money on the table.)
I don't know if that's what fly.io is going for here, but their competitors are explicitly leaning into that angle so it's not that implausible. Vercel is even vertically integrating the slop-to-prod pipeline with v0.
Look at stock market courses for instance. They are endlessly prevalent, an eternally green scam. People spend thousands to lose even more money all the time. Sunk cost fallacy is very hard for a lot of people to overcome. Scammers count on it. There is literally millions to be made in these scams if you have zero moral fiber and zero shame.
We are in a golden age of such scams. Not my quote but one article I read said something like business students right now are putting Adam Neumann's picture on their dorm walls to aspire to be like him...