Keep in mind that Lambda != APIG.
The use case that forced me to put “a” Lambda in a VPC was communicating with a financial institution that requires sftp request come from a whitelisted IP(or block of IP’s) since they were unwilling to whitelist every IP that AWS could possibly apply to an outbound connection from RandomLambda_01, I had to put it in a VPC.
But… Since this particular Lambda isn’t being called interactively by an end user, but being scheduled to make calls, or triggered by some other event, if it takes an extra 10 seconds to run, it doesn’t really effect anybody.
So yes “useless” is way to myopic as a blanket statement on a tool. It just may not be a good tool for your use case.