private ip ranges for cloud computing, do you think its important to "not be wasteful"?

so since there are around 16+million private ip addresses, do you as a rule still carve off very small subnets if you are only needing a few hosts in a particular subnet? to me it seems like you are either wasting addresses or time, since using /19 /22 /30 subnets require that people be able to do vlsm in their head or refer to a calculator (along with some troubleshooting scenarios since most people in IT have no idea how vlsm works)