Former AWS dev here -- the bar is the same but the workloads can be so insane that you meet the requirements faster than anywhere else in the company (there was one engineer that made principal like 5-6 years out of undergrad, which means they would've had to have been promoted every 1-2 years assuming they were hired as an L4). I think parent comment might be referring to more lenient stack ranking policies, I never experienced any of it during my time there but then again I saw teams with 20-30% annual turnover rates so no need to force people out when they're already showing themselves the door I guess :)