Not all places are doing research. In fact most are not! Knowing whether you're at a company willing to bet money on R&D, or whether you're at a company that wants you to come up with actionable, is pretty crucial. As you said, Amazon is not really out there doing research - so engineers working there would do well to assume they need deliverables to keep managers happy.
I agreed but in the case of the news we're commenting this feels an awful lot like an effort that would've benefitted from a proper R&D team where only the leadership would've had to be involved in company politics, goal-setting, etc.
