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Because it's more profitable to fork it, pay 2-3 engineers to maintain their fork, than to pay royalties forever.

That's true now, but maintaining isn't the same as building new stuff. Amazon would have to invest more to build new functionality that Elasticsearch has devs and community helping them build. This assumes the ecosystem of devs has no importance?

Yes.

They did it with ElasticSearch

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elastic...

And Java

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-corretto-no-c...

And something similar with Mongo DB.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-documentdb-with-...

Sure they would. AWS's Elasticsearch offering has fewer features than Elastic's offering but is still competitive due to its integration into AWS's other service offerings. The same is true for AWS's Redis offering.