Disclaimer: I work for a small e-commerce firm named after a large river, opinions are my own. Writing in response since the company I work at is one whose values is quoted in the article. My initial approach to the values was a similar "Who cares, these are bland corporatese" one. It wasn't until a 10+ year senior engineer on my team discussed the trade-offs between the values in an architecture meeting that I reall…
I previously felt these contradictions are problematic because they make it harder to use values for prioritisation. It's a good point you make about different values being applicable in different contexts. I wonder whether the context can be incorporated into the value?
For example "Bias for action when the cost of failure is low". In an oncall incident, restarting a stateless service is worth trying even before the problem is understood in depth, because risk of failure is low. There are potential actions in an oncall incident that could quite easily make things much worse - then it's probably worth diving deeper before taking action.
It might not be pithy enough for the value itself, but I think it's at least adding this kind of context to the subtext like Amazon have done in the page you linked to.