I worked at AWS before moving to Google. AWS is not perfect (their oncall story being a good example) but they have _a lot_ of very talented engineers and are _really_ good at doing ops (and cloud systems are necessarily sprawling, complex beasts that require a lot of operational support).

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.