Amazon pages are a cluttered mess, but they are a -familiar- cluttered mess because everyone has used Amazon for so long. Amazon succeeds in spite of its design, because everyone has become familiar with how it works. This approach would not work outside of Amazon, which Nielsen Norman discussed some 15 years ago (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-m...)
I wonder how this might read if written now, rather than 16 years ago.
NNG often say to follow conventions and Amazon has been leader for so long now that I can't help but think they have established many conventions now that might have been viewed negatively 16 years ago.
Ahh, you want "clean" design where maybe there is just one box with beautiful font and not all these options "cluttering" things. You want those options buried in an option tree maybe 8 levels deep.
Well, I'm pretty sick of this minimalist design philosophy that requires 10x more clicks to accomplish anything because a designer decided the original was just too easy to use and wasn't "engaging enough" to generate enough clicks. They have made the web a much worse place for getting stuff done online, and it's no wonder that Amazon, the home of one-click purchasing, has continued optimizing for having the UI get out of your way and accomplish the most with the least effort rather than building attention-seeking UI "experiences" that require lots of interactivity to get simple things done.
The big one that always gets me is sort by price doesn't actually sort by price. Or at least, not the price I care about (which is price for condition new, seller Amazon).
Consumer logistics - which rely on not paying drivers and warehouse people much, and forcing them to work insane hours.
And AWS.
The web store UX has become appallingly bad - unreliable/fake reviews, tens/hundreds of sellers all roboselling the same identical items from China, poor quality items, unreliable/poor product search ("10TB external hard drive" shows... not many 10TB external hard drives). And so on.