If you think I'm being hyperbolic, I'm not. Our org has recently gone through a PCI/DSS audit, and there was a lot of frustration about the amount of required changes with regards to locking down access policies, tracking suspicious activity, enforcing 2FA and such, but most of the stuff that I saw change was stuff that feels like it really should be entirely obligatory in the first place.

There is a great tradition in IT to teach yourselves using free (as well as free-of-charge) software, but when you're in the business of IT, there should be much stricter regulation. If you're a civil engineer and the bridge you design collapses because you did your math wrong, you are criminally liable for the damage. But if you're a software "architect" and you negligently put an instance of database-du-jour on the internet without proper access controls or a vulnerability tracking process, you most often get away by just saying "whoopsie-daisy" and giving a flimsy apology to the millions of customers that had their personal data stolen. Worst case scenario, you get a fee of a few percent of your earnings. That has to end.

That's a very simplistic view of how it works in even a medium sized real company. Google SSO is already available for many external services you might use which is a lot easier to integrate than doing and maintaining something yourself. Especially because if there's an issue it's blocking everyone in the company at the same time. It makes sense to outsource that if it's not your core business.

You're saying $500/mth, but my response would be: this is half a full time IT support position and it needs a secondary + on-call cover.

You go with companies that can demonstrate scalability because they provide project governance, proper change management, and layers of redundancy and support in the event of an emergency.

I can see how it might not be the solution you want for home but at work I'm just trying to get things done and that unfortunately involves a large number of passwords that can't easily be federated into an SSO like okta because they span businesses clients and companies. I don't understand the hate for LastPass, for me it just works (tm)

Sure, its not too hard to get around that feature, you could just inject your own javascript on the page to dump the contents of the password field. But it does block the low hanging fruit of the millions of users who don't know how to do that who might abuse having access to the password because they don't really know better.

In essence, it helps to prevent those users who don't know better from leaking the password to places it shouldn't be. Obviously it doesn't prevent people who know how to get around it from getting around that protection, but in those circumstances you shouldn't really be sharing your password with someone who will abuse your trust.