As general rules these sound great at first sight, but don’t really address the main culprit from TFA - like for like API Gateway costs a lot more to process n number of requests.
Well, given the feature set of API Gateway compared to a Load Balancer I think it should be expected that it costs more. But that’s also beside the point which is to use managed services to do the heavy lifting. Eg. if you need a PubSub service for IoT, that shouldn’t go through API Gateway and Lambda, there is a specific AWS service for that.