It's really amusing how bad Amazon is at writing and designing UI. For a company of their size and scope it's practically unforgivable. But they always get away with it.
At best, you can conclude that outdated product design doesn't always ruin a business (clearly). But you can't conclude the inverse (that investing in modern product design doesn't ever help a business).
Case in point: tell me, from the point of view of the user, how many steps it takes to deploy a NextJS/React ecosystem website with Vercel and with AWS, start to finish.
However, I don't think it's fair to say that this trade-off always wins out. Rather, they've carved out their own ecological niche and, for now, they're exploiting it well.
The AWS APIs are so expansive, a product like this could offer a complete replacement for the default web console and maybe even charge for it. Does anyone know if such a solution exists? Perhaps some more generic "shell-to-ui" application? If not, I'm interested in building one if anybody would like to contribute.
For most of AWS offerings, it literally doesn't matter and logging in to AWS Console is a break glass thing.
Case in point: this very article. It uses boto3 to interface with AWS.
I've heard multiple accounts of him seeing a WIP and asking for changes that compromise the product's MVP.
https://gist.github.com/kislayverma/d48b84db1ac5d737715e8319...
I read that post every couple of years or so.