Someone was probably promoted for the adoption of this "frugal" hiring practice. This is a culture problem that permeates all of Amazon and goes all the way to the top.
Find a new job. The reputation of your company is going down the drain.
As an in-demand software engineer with oncall experience at a well-regarded company, I will not consider jobs that require me to be on call.
Jobs with oncall don't offer more compensation than jobs that don't.
Scheduling my life around being able to answer a page is inconvenient, and waking up in the middle of the night is something I'd rather avoid.
Operational work is often not considered as important as feature development for promotions, so you feel like you're wasting your time when doing it.
In my experience, system quality is completely independent of whether the developers do oncall or not. But I'd welcome objective data that proves otherwise.
There is no upside for me as an individual to take a job with oncall responsibilities.