I'm not a big fan of what some designers deliver, but sitting down with maybe one or two users and seeing how they try to make sense of the mess that is AWS might have made sense.
Or the AWS API?
I actually think this is a product of Amazon's workplace culture. The old joke about the first 90% taking 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time. Amazon only invests in the first 90%, and doesn't give a shit about the rest of it because they have already won the monopoly, and their sociopathic stack ranking forced firing culture won't reward people working on polish.
In UIs, that second 90% is polish. Polish comes from low priority ticket/feature fulfillment, and if you're working on low priority tickets, that means you're getting fired in the next reaper cycle.