It’s clear from the article keeping the marketplace clean is not a company wide priority. Amazon famously has very decoupled teams so they have a team setup for this that filters incoming listings, and that is it. After all many of these banned items don’t really harm the user “just” society at large, so it’s not very “customer obsessed” to spend a big effort cross company to stamp them out. It would not surprise me if every flaw this article pointed out was known, and the isolated team simply does not have the people and politics power to fix it.

You can see this because the teams which manage virtually every other part of the site are not involved - the search recommendation was suggesting banned items - the buy together team does not use it’s system to find banned products related to removed items - the amazons choice team does not apply extra diligence to the things it flags. All things that a postmortem on now people find banned items would come up as action items. I bet they probably have, but it was low priory on those teams backlog.

It’s also clear they have not funded a big enough secret shopper team to just act like a user and try and buy banned products and then make reports to various teams across the site where they have gaps. If an outsider can sit down with your system and find bugs after a little bit of time, you don’t have a decent quality process in place.