Not too push the point too hard, but a "dev environment" for a product is for a business (not an individual consumer). Having a server (rack) in an office is not that hard, but alas the cloud might be better here for ease of administration.
I don't think so. An organization so big and bureaucratic that needs 3 months to authorize a server purchase will for sure need a few weeks of paperwork to authorize a new AWS account creation, and will track the spending for OU and will cut budget and usage if they think you deserve it.
And plenty of datacenters will be happy to give you some space in one of their racks.
Not wanting to deal with backups or HA are decent reasons to put a database in the cloud (as long as you are aware how much you are overpaying). Not having a good place to put the server is not a good reason
My understanding is that aws exists because we can't get any purchase approved in under three months.