I haven't noticed this with Route 53 (but I also haven't used it for a year). My experience was that even Amazon's resolvers didn't update with my changes immediately. So if I added a record, then immediately did "dig @8.8.8.8 my.new.domain", I would get NXDOMAIN cached for the time on my SOA record. To avoid that wait, I had to be careful to not try resolving it for a couple minutes, so that the NXDOMAIN wouldn't be cached.

Maybe things have changed, which would be nice. Nowadays I'm on DigitalOcean and they don't let you control the TTL on the SOA record, so you have to be even more careful than with Amazon. Very annoying.