Is Amazon’s approach to this policy reasonable and effective given the resources at the company’s disposal? Amazon is a tech behemoth. Surely they could spare a developer or two to come up with a more effective and automated way to monitor for banned items. A process that looks for keywords wouldn’t be hard, especially given how Amazon’s retail system works. Or maybe a system that identifies product listing photos that are similar shape/size to banned items. Amazon has some experience with image recognition and machine learning that would make that much easier to implement compared to most online retailers that allow third-party listings.
Amazon is more than capable of designing and implementing procedures to achieve much more robust compliance with their policy without expending considerably more effort. The only reason they don’t is because they don’t want to - because it hurts their bottom line and (for now) failing to reasonably and effectively implement their policy costs them only the occasional PR ding.