From the outside I dont perceive the promotion dynamics for engineers working on old services is that different at AWS than Google or Azure. Finance and engineering do conspire to kill off things despite customer annoyance, perhaps as they should.
There is also a constant churn of retiring EC2 instance types, security certs, old database versions, EMR versions, OS versions, security practices, cost optimizations, etc to suck up your time with minimal business value. This is not different fundamentally than on prem, you just have slightly less control and an outside party forcing your hand to do the right thing isnt purely a bad thing...
AWS is pretty good about giving you a grace period to migrate off and informal warnings if they strategically want you to move to a different service of theirs before stuff gets killed if you are looped in with a TAM (e.g Data Pipelines vs more-expensive Glue). They seem to have recently migrated to a strategy where they disable services for new customers but actually dont kill them completely off but keep them on life support.
The only product I know well in your list is pre-VPC ec2 instances, which (to be fair) are a terrible product : it is cross tenant (as in : you can impact other customers). Good riddance.
I think many AWS services are well designed : isolated software-only components. They build a lot on top of a very stable infrastructure (VPC / s3 / ec2 / IAM), which means supporting a service is really cheap : they are just a couple of containers running somewhere
For one, the OpsWorks configuration management tool is being replaced with Management Console, which is more encompassing, but different. You have to manually migrate or rebuild any deployed resources from one to the other.
