Anecdote, but I had a friend who recently finished working at Amazon in a analysis position and he took quarterly trips with colleagues from Seattle to meet in NYC for a few hours, stayed for almost a week, at out at fine restaurants, all on the company dime.

One person taking advantage of travel doesn't imply the entire companies frugality principle is a facade.

Their recruiting technique of flying thousands of random LinkedIn users to Seattle every week for fruitless interviews doesn't seem very frugal.

It's not! Instead it's part of principle #6, "hire the best." Hire the best, frugally.

Their leadership principles are deliberately contradictory. This is ostensibly a strength: you are tasked with satisfying all of them at once. But I fear in practice it's license to justify any management behavior.

Source: oh god I interviewed there.

Sounds like bitterness because you weren't offered a position.