Perhaps your corner of AWS isn't as nice as the one I worked in but to generalize that to AWS management "death marching mediocre talent to ship untested and brittle things" is a very inaccurate assessment of AWS and its customers' perceptions of their products.
Were other non-Amazon companies impacted directly by the storms? I have no idea where Microsoft and Google cloud server farms live, but it's a bit of a stretch to say that a major weather event causing downtime is due to "bubble gum and bailing wire". You could be right - I don't know anything about their setup - but "throwaway985325" isn't exactly a trustworthy source.
I don't know if other cloud providers were impacted, but I'm willing to bet they were not impacted intermittently for 6 hours.
AWS has gotten to the service and infrastructure footprint it has today by death marching mediocre talent to ship untested and brittle things. This is true all the way down into the physical infrastructure, which often breaks and causes regional havoc. Great examples from the last 6 months include the 40 minute outage in US-WEST-2 in September, or the several hour event in US-EAST-1 during the East Coast wind storms. Bubble gum and baling wire.
They're trying to stabilize things, but leadership and sales are often committing to large spend customers and financing new features with technical debt (when current technical debt is not being serviced). Those at the top are not really concerned with running a solid or innovative platform as much as just pure growth and revenue.