You can use actual CH Cloud on AWS?..

I'm aware; unfortunately that then leads to "must have a vendor approval" and a lot more process. If it were RDS, then it'd just be provision and done.

So how is clickhouse supposed to make money and continue to develop the product if you will only buy from AWS?

They have a partnership IIRC, they could pay ClickHouse like they do many others.

AWS acquired DuckLabs recently, there is a chance they will release a product competing with CH/Snowflake as a new RDS offering

They won't be able to resist the temptation of ruining it before launch by deciding to tie it into AWS Glue

Doesn't aws marketplace help with that?

No, because the issue is navigating legal agreements with your vendors, not the ease of deploying. With AWS Marketplace you are making a new legal agreement with the vendor of the product, not with Amazon.

Do any two teams actually operate it in anything like the same way though?

What I saw of it, especially some years ago, was it was highly particular, and everyone had their own odd habits built around running it, ingestion, querying, everything, to the point I suspect there are a non trivial number of companies using it where it is actually the core operational expertise of the company, despite them all appearing to be in totally different domains.

You can use ClickHouse cloud to host it on AWS.

But given the majority of use-cases of CH, AWS can be quite expensive.

Using BYOC management reduces the costs significantly. The big cost in analytic SaaS offerings is generally compute, which vendors mark up significantly. (They keep margins low on storage.)

Disclosure: My company Altinity offers BYOC management of ClickHouse.