My anecdote is someone gets a cert and now has extremely limited understanding of the technologies and wants to use it for everything. I've had to fight back against the idea that the solutions are cheaper, that everyone doing ETL needs elastic MapReduce, etc. I think it is compounded by things like acloudguru pushing out sales engineer (associate architect, literally just the selling points of the tech) certifications by teaching the exam basically question for question, so actual understanding is minimal.

My point being that people who get them evangelize AWS and the certs themselves teach absolutely no technical competency. Compound this with requiring x number for cert holders for partnership benefits I think it was clearly intended to get people excited about selling AWS rather than exhibiting any kind of competence with primitives and concepts compared to something like CCN*.