I find it hard to argue that it is a lie, when it is not said which part of AWS is actually required. The systems you mention are multiple orders of magnitude smaller. It is not clear that they would be able to scale to the same size.
You would require geographically distributed data centers with good and stable connectivity between them and at least some form of globally replicated fast database. It is indeed not so easy.
I find it hard to argue that it is a lie, when it is not said which part of AWS is actually required. The systems you mention are multiple orders of magnitude smaller. It is not clear that they would be able to scale to the same size.
You would require geographically distributed data centers with good and stable connectivity between them and at least some form of globally replicated fast database. It is indeed not so easy.