Agreed - the Java SDK v2 has had 20 updates this month alone (sometimes two or three times in one day) so definitely not much in the way of manual updates.
As with all the other AWS SDKs, the bulk of the code is generated. The JSON service definitions are shared, the effort (one expects) is in being adding support for all the different ways in which the JSON indicates that services behave, and making it look like it could have been hand-written.