Worth noting upfront: the author's own consultancy is promoted at the end as the solution to exactly this problem, doesn't make the numbers wrong, but worth factoring in.
The "deployment decision preceded the cost model" point is the sharpest one, piloting on single queries then shipping agentic workflows that use 5-30x more tokens per task means the ROI math was validated against a completely different consumption pattern than what actually shipped. Not careless, just a measurement-timing failure.
The cloud-2018 parallel is apt but incomplete, cloud waste was caught by visibility alone (idle resources). Token waste needs an actual routing decision made correctly upfront; a dashboard tells you where money went, it doesn't route the next query to a cheaper model on its own.