I've heard similar stories from several AWS engineers who were looking to leave or recently left. I can believe that pieces of AWS have good culture, because AWS is a large set of services and it's inevitable that it's not 100% consistent across the entire organization. But I also fully believe that parts of AWS are "duct taped together and on fire" because I've heard it from multiple sources.

I've never had anyone in person tell me that Amazon was a good place to work unless they were trying to recruit me.