CodeDeploy fails in horrible ways and the maintainers are somewhat unresponsive. I don't use it anymore but am still subscribed to some issues which apparently weren't fixed for years...

From my experience the products work fine, but they much more complex than they need to be (and than competing products are). They have a lot of weird constraints that make it hard to be really productive.

That said, when you've setup a build/pipeline, it mostly just works as it should.

I have used CodeDeploy/Codepipeline/Codebuild over several years. Overall they work well but there can be edge cases or gotchas that show up on occasion depending what you are trying to do.

I also prefer externalizing the CI/CD process with Jenkins or Spinnaker-based setups.

I have. Their offerings are even less impressive than many of the popular SaaS CI servers, which themselves are usually (and incredibly!) inferior to Jenkins - except they maintain themselves due to all the cloud whatnot

Unfortunately surprisingly poor in quality!

You can get much better results almost anywhere else.

I'm going to chime in and say the only benefit we got from CodeDeploy was its cost was folded into our AWS account. We didn't have to go through the hassle of explaining why we need "yet another <$100/month expense" from a different company.

I appreciate this is a bad reason to recommend a service, and am not defending it. Just explaining why we wound up using it.

The service itself is not horrible, but like every other AWS service, I felt like I was definitely not in the target market: some easily implemented feature was left out and the configuration space easily allowed you to specify things that weren't covered in the (very) thin documentation and seemed to behave unexpectedly.

Many SaaS companies offer the ability to pay for themselves via the AWS marketplace so you can have everything under one EDP / bill (though AWS takes a little cut in this case).