Reminds me of a customer that had in their contract requirements GHz amount so after we won the contract we digged out some old P4 based Xeons (everything after for a long time had lower clocks) and they got their stuff ran on old junk because it would be breach of contact not to.
It was govt thing and they are required to put a new bid every few years and their bid was EVIDENTLY "just list what our current hosting provider has, we can't be arsed to spend months migrating infrastructure every few years", but the clever weasels in the sales managed to get them.
In some sense, core licensing is worse, in that you are also paying for idle capacity. But when you try to scale by activity, I think you will see it is not that much different.
One day, 2 years ago, it was the day i was supposed to get the money from my stock options. More than 100.000€.
The day before, my 2 bosses called me for a meeting, and they told me they were going to transfer only 1/3 of that amount in stocks.
Why? No single reason other that they had no time to manage it, even though i asked 5 months before and i remembered them every week for a month before.
So i had to stay another year because they refused to give me the full amount.
Next year i went full legal mode and sent a burofax. No way to escape now, i got all my money.
By now, i've been the only one in my company to get money from our stock options plan.
