It's also inflated by large companies with dozens of class A networks, but who actually need a total of maybe just a few class C subnets. I once worked for a company with tens of thousands of computers that were using public IP addresses, but they were all completely firewalled, and they used proxies for limited Internet access.
Do you have any examples of large companies that have multiple /8s but can get away with a /21?
Which company has dozens of class A networks? The only one I'm aware of with two is HP who had 15/8 and 16/8, but I think they returned at least a significant amount of that.
BBN/successors may have held multiple class As at times, but being large ISPs probably used a lot of the space? Various clouds have a lot of space, but afaik, not in the form of whole class As.
Looks like IBM probably had multiple class As through acquisition, but I don't think they still hold them either?