It's perhaps not nefarious. A lot of GAAP and the standards came about when manufacturing was a lot more prevalent. Concepts like depreciation make a lot more sense when you mentally place yourself in the 1920s.
Depreciation still makes plenty of sense today. A company with very little capital equipment will simply not have a lot of depreciation. Digital ocean as a cloud hoster has a lot of capital equipment (servers etc) to worry about as well.
Which makes a lot of sense, especially when it comes to compensation where not capitalizing end would lead to incentives to not invest in it even if it is profitable. It doesn't make sense to expense it right away when it's something that, like capex, is meant to essentially purchase assets that can pay off later. If those revenues fail to materialize, then the bottom line takes a hit then, just as a company would take a hit if expenditure on a factory proves to be worthless. The goal of this sort of accounting is to reflect economics better, we have statements of cash flows to keep a track of cash and you're more than free to use that in valuing a company (and many analysts do ignore everything but cash)
