Amazon is a giant machine with hundreds of thousands of employees. How many SDE 1s do they hire Evey year globally? Hundreds? More? How do you possibly treat them all fairly when no single person has met them all?
The result is that companies like that become heavily systematized. Even if your boss wanted to promote you, they would have to defend the promotion to their boss which requieres evidence. And that boss has to justify all their promotions to their director or VP by demonstrating how they are making an impact across multiple teams - thus more evidence.
All that takes documentation. There are just too many people involved for promotions to be based on personal relationships.
What if one boss is super promotion-happy and another never promotes? How do you fix it? Because this happens all the time. Thus you need documentation to justify why each person gets promoted so there's at least so level of fairness - even if that documentation is totally detached from how you feel you do on a day to day basis.
Yes, big tech companies are soulless machines and you are right to leave if you don't want to live that life. The only way to succeed there is to learn how to play the game to some extent. It is just how it is. No one else has found a less terrible system that seems to work much better when that many people are involved and are competing with each other for money and promotions.
