Moreover, you listed them using the denunciatory political rhetoric that is most antithetical to the curious conversation we want here. No doubt BigCo deserves it, or at least you feel they do (and I'm sure you have many good points), but we're trying to optimize for one specific thing here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
It sounds like you define flamewar more narrowly, which is fine—I'm talking about the kind of high-indignation-low-information internet discussion that evokes angry-reflexive responses from people instead of curious-reflective ones. Internet threads have a strong tendency to end up in that state, and it's exactly the opposite of what we're going for here (see that previous link), so we end up expending a lot of energy to try to stave it off.
People often mention "correctness" (or "truth" or "facts") to justify breaking the site guidelines, but of course there are plenty of ways to be aggressive, flamebaity, or just plain off topic* while nevertheless saying correct things. Correctness is great, but those other qualities are undesirable regardless of how correct you are or feel you are. Here are a couple recent explanations on this last point if you or anyone want more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32909407
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697044
Lots more here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
* Not all offtopicness is bad; whimsical offtopicness is usually fine. It's the generic tangents that are bad, because they drag down discussion quality.
A discussion about their engineering culture without discussing the larger related problems is myopic. It would be like discussing problems with the logistics of moving people to the gulags and you’re saying we shouldn’t get off the topic of transportation.
There shouldn’t be any flame “war” because everything I said is correct. I don’t think there’s any popular defense of these behaviors from Amazon, flame wars are characterized by popular opposing schools of thought.