Seems like a pretty dubious claim. I'd love to seem some sources to support it.

Since inception, Amazon has achieved nearly unprecedented growth of revenue, profits, employee head count, customer base, product offerings, and just about any other business metric.

You believe all of this was achieved with mediocre talent? I doubt it, but maybe you're right. Either way, so what? If Jeff Bezos has figured out how to create an innovative, world leading, ultra high performance business with mediocre talent, his accomplishments (vis-à-vis Amazon) are even more admirable.

That's interesting - at least from what I've seen they've been able to lowball folks (relatively) and still get hires in.

Given that they can only hire mediocre tech talent, this speaks to perhaps the success of the HR management that they were able to build what looks like a market leading offering in AWS (the scale of which is absolutely huge - all built by these mediocre engineer!)

Structural barriers to entry will mask all manner of incompetence (c.f. Microsoft in the 90s). It’s important for our industry to recognize what actually leads to success instead of cargo culting horrible managerial practices that only succeed because the practitioners have first mover advantage, regulatory capture, network effects…