RDS, Route53, and Elasticache are decent, too. But yes, I've also been bitten badly in the distant past by attempting to rely on their higher-level services. I guess some things don't change.
I wonder if the difference is stuff they dogfood versus stuff they don't?
I once used one of their services (I forget which, but I think it was there serverless product) that “supported” Java.
… but the official command line tools had show-stopper bugs if you were deploying Java to this service, that’d been known for months, and some features couldn’t be used in Java, and the docs were only like 20% complete.
But this work-in-progress alpha (not even beta quality because it couldn’t plausibly be considered feature complete) counted as “supported” alongside other languages that were actually supported.
(This was a few years ago and this particular thing might be a lot better now, but it shows how little you can trust their marketing pages and GUI AWS dashboards)
I'm assuming you're talking about Lambda. I don't mess with their default images. Write a Dockerfile and use containerized Lambdas. Saves so many headaches. Still have to deal with RIE though, which is annoying.
I wonder if the difference is stuff they dogfood versus stuff they don't?