Amazon is heterogeneous. So much so, that positive anecdotes and negative anecdotes are near worthless without specifying the org.

Depending on if you're a cost cutting team, fixed expense team or organization, if you're a revenue driving team, or if you're a core team, or the very many other splits you can come up about the relationship between the expense/balance sheets and the team itself...there are very very different attitudes towards COEs and leadership principles.

This was very much my experience, having worked in two different sub-organizations at AWS, and on several different services, in two different countries.

There's just extreme variation in the quality of the management, the quality of the engineers, the operational/development role split, the on-call schedule, and the development and testing methodology.