If it makes you feel better, normal companies have "cost accountants", whose entire job is to worry about this kind of problem. Cost accounting a fairly well-developed field with a long history. There are several major approaches and some less well known ones.
I think the most applicable in our field is "resource cost accounting", which looks superficially like what Netflix described. You keep "resource accounts" in the units of the actual stuff consumed by your business processes, then map backwards from the final product to costs.
Of course I am not an accountant. Just took a course and found it enlightening.
I think the difference is that Netflix sees these problems and has the person-power to solve them and make themselves leaner. I guess it comes down to how far ahead you're looking really and tech companies are incentivised to look further ahead than your average big company. They're all planning for world domination (whether that actually happens or not)
I don't disagree, I'm just trying to convey that in some sense the forward-looking effort would be accelerated by looking sideways as well. Cost accounting is practiced widely in many industries and appears in medium-sized businesses (tens of employees) as well as large businesses (tens of thousands of employees).
I think the most applicable in our field is "resource cost accounting", which looks superficially like what Netflix described. You keep "resource accounts" in the units of the actual stuff consumed by your business processes, then map backwards from the final product to costs.
Of course I am not an accountant. Just took a course and found it enlightening.