You are right that HM have little influence, you "hire for Amazon", not for any specific team.
And with the process changes in the US (and EU), candidates are now given the option of picking the team they want to join (which can be different from the interview-HM's team).
This needs to be upvoted a bit more. The article is clickbait, and most comments in this thread reflect how effective it is at it.
The hiring process for corp employees makes the practice the article is claiming very, very, very hard to do.
There's bar raiser, there are 2-3 additional interviewers, and the hiring manager. The initial voting process is blind. The HM would need to be very very good at convincing the BR+others in order to hire a candidate that they don't want (this is assuming no one wants the candidate).
Plus, there are a bunch of other incentives countering you to hire someone that you don't want - it costs money, it eats up your allocated headcount, and it's going to take a while for you to onboard the new hire, which is going to eat up your team's bandwidth.