Your title is clickbait
My first job, decades ago. I couldn't update something on my laptop because client's gateway blocked `http://foo.com/update.exe`. Guess what, `http://foo.com/update.exe?` worked as a bypass.
I installed a web proxy on my VPS, which was accessible under a domain name like "computerthings.example", created a subdomain called "microsoft", and voila: "microsoft.computerthings.example" was good enough to match "^microsoft.com.*" and allowed us to bypass the block for the next two years.
Yes yes, I know, folder/file naming convention dating from...
But it's current year now
Django redirects one version to another by default, which achieves that.
They also didn't mention the company.
The title feels clickbaity as it's not specific to AWS API gateway and instead, the implementation of it.
And who hosts on blogspot...
This is arguing for style over substance. The goal is to explain how a bug impacts the company. Anything that achieves the goal is de facto good. Remember, the alternative is for the company not to be notified at all.
I think 12k could be fine given how much it might have cost them if nobody had noticed.
Noticed that non-responsive blog layouts are rare these days. Most are from blogspot. So I took a look and realized that blogger nowadays actually supports responsive layouts, but apparently... they are not popular?
https://blogger.googleblog.com/2017/03/share-your-unique-sty...
Turning a $10 bug into a $12K issue and if this was at a big tech company it would be a $120K+ issue.