1) They were willing to sell DDoS protection to DDoS services

2) This decision was made specifically because the existence of DDoS services increased the value of their product

This was always a weird claim, because the first part is 100% true -- while the second part was always unfounded speculation. The conclusion is thus most likely false. They just didn't want to incorporate that sort of thing into their ToS or vet their customers in that way, for various understandable reasons.

Going to Akamai's site I don't see a single mention of pricing, I don't want to be smooched by some enterprise salesman to get my pricing options.

Going to Fastly's site I see egress costs that makes me think I could probably be better of just staying on AWS,Azure or smth and have a single bill to care about. (That have their own expensive options).

There's probably other small players with sane options pricing wise, but when it comes to managing DDoS issues people want someone big to handle the bulk.