Those managers were definitely lazy. The parent commenter is not. As an Amazon manager you have tremendous power to screw over your reports and take credit for cutting out low performers. Not going that way and actually investing to "hire and develop the best" is the right and the hard thing to do. I think the hire and develop lp is the one which is enforced the least at Amazon and that's due to lazy management.
Sure. I agree with you here. These managers were lazy and it just means that Amazon internal KPIs reward lazy and use-and-throw management over actually developing talent. How sustainable this strategy is only time will tell.
I think you did the right thing. But to me it seems the other managers were doing the job amazon told them to do, not being lazy.