Are AWS docs getting less reliable, or is this a rough patch?

The specific examples you found sound broken, not merely hard to follow. A wrong flag and invalid snippets can turn a short setup into hours of avoidable debugging. The contrast with clearer documentation for another tool is understandable, though a couple of bad pages alone cannot show whether quality is declining across AWS.

AWS docs have seemed uneven for a long time. Some areas are thorough, while other pages assume you already know which service guide or prerequisite to find. New features may be especially rough around the edges, and blog posts can lag behind maintained technical guides. So I would call this a real documentation problem, but not proof that every part of the documentation got worse recently.

For setup guides, the bar should be simple: the commands and configuration snippets need to work, and prerequisites should be stated before the steps depend on them. Check that the roles and network resources match the feature, but don't treat missing setup as something a reader should have to infer. The page feedback option can be useful for reporting exact corrections, though that does not undo the time already spent.

This is also a weak spot for coding assistants. If the official examples have stale syntax or leave out prerequisites, an assistant may repeat the same mistake with confidence. They can help locate concepts, but I would still validate commands against current service references and test snippets rather than assuming generated guidance is correct.