It is different in spirit.

A marketing scheme intended to attract new customers is well within what's morally accepted. Also, it's not like every guy that goes to AWS re:Invent comes back with a brand new luxury car. What they get is just some good food and drinks, while they're there, and that's just providing good hospitality for your guests. It also does not happen behind closed doors, and most of the people that go are already existing customers.

vs.

Corrupt company approaches corrupt employee off the record to offer cash in exchange of contracts that would not get assigned to them otherwise (because if they were, they wouldn't resort to this).

The main difference here is the scale.

"Let us take you on a $2000 vacation" vs. "Let us take you on a $700,000 vacation." One is objectively ridiculous - this is the difference.

So what you’re saying is taking a smaller bribe is okay? Just as long as it’s not a “ridiculous” bribe…

There are thresholds elsewhere. For example, a civil servant can accept a gift, up to a very small amount, from a vendor without being an ethics violation.

But there’s proportional impact as well. The person who got the AWS treatment might be responsible for $50K of AWS budget. And the person at Netflix is responsible for millions of dollars of budgets, royalties and other schemes.