Your paraphrase isn't wrong either, but I would suggest a modification to it: "it will suck you dry, if either (1) you don't fit in with the company culture, or (2) you are placed in a bad situation on a team with poor leadership and high attrition".
Perhaps shockingly, not every team at Amazon is constantly quitting (e.g. my direct team in the last two years has had 1 person voluntarily leave for a better opportunity - and we wished them well, and 0 attrition otherwise), and also some people actually appreciate and gravitate towards some things like, what the author calls "team are fragile" culture (because it is in fact a kind of durability/resiliency that there is less reliance on special rockstars, irreplaceable dependencies, and that teams can be fluid but the product mostly works/lives-on).
I agree that it definitely doesn't read like a straight tale of horror and abuse. But I don't see how can you sum it up it by saying "he found some good practices" when he takes care to point out, for example:
Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)
Sounds like a grind, day-in, day-out, with lots of made up stress.
Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent doing “program” style work which leaves about 10% of my time for technical work. Ultimately this is not what I want to be doing with my career.
So the work sucked basically. And definitely wasn't what he was expecting.
One of the projects I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript) was tasked with doing the front end system design for a React application (and the API that would power the UI).
Standard sweatshop practices, sounds like.
Oh and did we mention on-call? About which he says:
To be blunt: it sucks.
Which (among other reasons) is why he quit after 10 months. Which is definitely not a step to be taken lightly, because (aside from losing on the compensation) it basically amounts to a resume stain.
Now of course he said positive things as well, and it wasn't a simple condemnation of Amazon, by any stretch. But still -- it strikes me as rather strange that you are somehow able sum it up as "he had good things happen to him there" and it was a "succesful outcome".
To my ears, his experience there read like a very mixed bag.
My paraphrase of his report would be: "You learn a lot there, but it's a grind that will suck you dry before you know it."