Personally, I feel as though they are getting out of hand. A guy in my org literally has 5 certs, and does very minimal AWS work (basic web product). I have no certs and am building out cloud native apps in AWS doing things like batch processing millions of customer data. I'm not knocking being able to learn and enhance your skillset and marketability... I just think something is fundamentally flawed here(maybe its the pre-reqs, or the acloudguru focused training on getting a passing exam score).

We incentivize devs in our development program to get certs, but those devs will rarely ever touch production AWS work for a couple years - no trust & no valid experience. I am given no incentive/time to get a cert in office hours (so yea, I'm a bit salty).

On LinkedIn, I literally see 10s of posts with some dev boasting about their new cert, but I can't imagine that many devs actually doing serious AWS work. Seriously, a kid a year out of college who mostly tweaks CSS and iOS UIs is now a "Certified Solutions Architect" on LinkedIn.