Those Amazon branded products are the only things I really feel comfortable buying from Amazon these days... it's the one item I'm 99% positive they'd never allow co-mingling or other BS sources for.

Same applies to Microsoft as well. Remember Ami Pro, WordPerfect?

Isn’t Word Perfect still used in the legal profession, because of how it aligns the text with precision during print out? (Or something like that.)

How is this different than Walmart, Target, or name any grocery store offering their branded version of products in order to drive down prices?

In many cases those store brand products are made by the same manufacturer as the brand names, but I don't think Amazon typically negotiates with the original product owner for manufacturing their clone.

Most of the Amazon X products I can think of are really basic obvious things. Sheets, cables, simple computer peripherals... well OK those are the things I remember ordering offhand that were such things.

My point is that they'd be categorized as basic staple items. Someone else might have sold a particular size or feature of X, but I don't see any reason why Amazon or another competitor wouldn't think to copy it.

Instead (as I made in a different reply a couple hours before yours) I believe it's the strength of Brand Recognition as a form of Quality Control, which is an area that has decayed on Amazon as a whole but less so with their own brand of products.

Not all of their products are "Amazon Basics" products - they have a lot of private label brands that aren't obviously "Amazon".

But the article I referenced above was a company that came out with a nice laptop stand design and a few months later, Amazon started selling one of their own that looked basically the same (but not identical).