The goal was to train ML enough so that humans were rarely necessary, obviously.

Yes, that's the goal.

There's a long rich history of AI like outcomes being mimiced by just hiding the human who does the work. That's actually the source of the name of Amazon's own "Mechanical Turk" service.

Not being actively watched by an army of underpaid workers is effectively still on the "someday...maybe" feature list for this thing, unless Amazon (famous for making delivery workers pee in soda bottles, and allowing warehouse workers to get heat stroke) somehow provides credible proof that they've actually grown past that.

I, as someone with substantial professional ML experience, won't take Amazon at their word, when they claim the ML has alleviated the need for the army of workers watching cameras. That's bullshit marketing promise, until proven otherwise. Particularly coming from Amazon.

Moving away from the people watching to using pure AI is well within the realm of possibility.

But good AI maintainers cost more per hour to pay than the entire army of mechanical turk "trainers". So I am skeptical of any claim that Amazon, in particular, has done the right thing here.

So it's very fair to assume you're being watched in one of those stores, until real credible evidence is provided that you're not.