Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is way, WAY worse than this.
In my experience plenty of cloud credits get sold (or "attached" to some other deal) to customers where the sales team thinks they've done their job. Meanwhile, IT personnel at the customer, who are already familiar with AWS, Azure, etc... have ZERO interest in spending any time working with non-market-leading cloud infrastructure. In fact, they know that if anything, oracle cloud is actually detrimental to what makes them look good on their resumes since very few employers are looking for oracle cloud expertise.
We had one customer (fortune 100) who purchased literally millions in oracle cloud credits (it was a multi year deal where the credits started at something like $1M yr 1, then $1.5M year 2... for about 4 or 5 years total). There was all this pressure from oracle management for the sales team to get the customer to start consuming these so that after the deal was up they would have to re-up. So we went in and gave all sorts of training to folks all over their IT org. It was like pulling teeth just to get them to tinker with the technology, let alone actually work to deploy an actual project on it. They would drag their feat on everything since they already had Amazon and Azure in place, already had mechanisms to procure, deploy, and use our competitors' infrastructure, which they continued to do rather than bother with pre-paid oracle cloud credits. We could not get traction anywhere.
The only place where I've seen the customer actually adopt our stuff for real work was a place where they already tons of oracle SAAS apps (ERP, HCM, etc...), and the CIO hired a guy to come in to try to cut overall costs. There was a dogfight against Amazon along with a variety of cloud based PAAS stuff, which miraculously we won. In this case the project ended up being a "cram-down" of our PAAS and IAAS stuff onto IT, who really wanted nothing to do with any of it. In fact, they were really enemies of Oracle the entire way leading up to and into the project. Once things got rolling, however, since the project was driven from the CIO level (and above), they ended having no choice except to move ahead with oracle.
So I don't know what you mean when you describe "strategic" deals, but if you mean strategic to you, that's a heckofalot different from strategic to the customer. I.e., you may get lots of credits "sold", but in most cases it will be a MAJOR uphill battle to get them to actually adopt and use our technology..
Things don't look good, IMHO, and good luck.