No they overspent and cut people based on an algorithm. The goal is to fire people and rehire them cheaper in an attempt to lower the overall salaries in the industry. It worked.

You misunderstood, the article is about firing more senior devs.

I believe AWS has a decent degree of autonomy to run itself even though it is a subsidiary of Amazon. Since they’re the ones actually designing and building its AI datacenters, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a slightly different outlook as the part of the company that sees how the sausage is made.