>Why does such an option even exist? That's barely one step above accessible to all.
Perhaps because it's Amazon Web Services?
In the olden days, when I was a lad, we had three tiers: Presentation, Application and Data in our networks. Only the first was accessible from the internet. There was a good reason for that.
Then, in order to cut costs, we cut layers out of the network and we put our data layer directly on the internet. That means that when we mess up, as fallible humans are wont to do, it immediately becomes both obvious and damaging. However, if you are a large enough company, the impact probably isn't that high.
Security is hard and it impedes the flow of money. So why not "simplify" the design and just blame the engineers for mistakes?