And they like to burn a ton of tokens writing and debugging tests that are semantically corrupt.

Unit tests are a type of dynamic testing. As opposed to static testing which is linting/typechecking etc.

If you want a difference kind of dynamic testing besides unit tests, have you tried writing it in as a requirement during the planning/PRD phase?

And AWS heavily pushes a complex lambda solution stringing together as many chargeable AWS services as possible for a simple requirement

Their interests are often not your interests. In this case they want you to unnecessary money on useless work (let's stop the euphemism of "tokens" btw)

you can just tell them to do more dynamic testing. I think dynamic testing is partly frowned upon because it slows things down & can take down software where you wouldn't expect