As someone who is involved in some of the recruiting process at a large tech company, I can say that the Amazonians who come our way tend to be decent people stuck in a toxic environment. Whenever I do a culture fit interview with them, I have several tactics I use to draw out the horror stories they inevitably have, and I'm usually pleasantly surprised by how they seemed to have maintained their own integrity through it all.

The contrast of their own attitude and actions in the face of being in a bad situation ends of very much working to their advantage. I enthusiastically recommend many of them as a "hire." On the flip side, every so often I churn up one of the perpetrators of toxicity, and I make sure what they tell me about themselves gets meticulously captured and reported to the decision makers.

So just having worked at Amazon doesn't automatically disqualify you in my book.

My experience matches yours, my friends and acquaintances at Amazon have been fine people, it’s just that some of their organizational decisions / probably how middle management comp gets calculated can make things toxic.

Also Amazon is easier to get hired at than other big tech companies, so I guess it is some strategic decision to hire/fire easily rather than have a stricter hiring process that would also introduced a lot of false negatives (like FLAG do).