I have seen this sort of sentiment many times, and the narrative here aligns with the main thread. I also know a few in my circle who I respect and think very highly of, but only worked at Amazon for ~1 year, and all of these people have been very quiet about their experience at Amazon. Also, I understand that the leadership principles are taken very seriously. My question: How are the leadership principles used in a way that leads to such a bad experience?

The problem at Amazon as I understand it is extremely darwinian stack-ranking. The leadership principles don’t address this. Even if you have a team of 10 senior high achievers by every metric, some percentage of them have to be managed out every N months. It’s absolutely insane.

If Apple did this, they’d never ship hardware or software updates.

A small part of the problem that's I observed during my interview there is the person who interviewed me mentioned that the teams largely operate independently, and sometimes have competing ideas. First across the finish line wins.

Ultimately, this, I think, sets up a lot of perverse incentives. Engineers are encouraged to burn themselves out to beat their coworkers, and there's less value in maintaining a good product. Anyone who remembers the very early days of their cloud offerings could pretty easily see the results.

Amazon is a retailer, and the mindset of a retailer is squeezing fractions of a penny out of toilet paper vendors. None of the original leadership principles says anything about human beings.