The recruiting reach is high because every single sub-group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same time is completely immaterial, just like if they were recruiters from other companies.

And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft.

Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked at (or got offers from) some of them.

That said, the interactions I've had with the people working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy to work with and obviously very skilled engineers.