> because AWS doesn't truly understand their own systems due to the culture of the company.

This. There's a lot of freedom in how teams operate. Some teams have great internal documentation, others don't, and a lot of it is scattered across the internal Amazon wiki. I recall having to reach out on slack on multiple occasions to figure out how certain systems worked after diving through docs and the relevant issue trackers didn't make it clear.

AWS also has a pretty diverse set of hardware, and often several generations of software running in parallel. Usually because the new generation does not quite support 100% of features from the previous generation.