I don't work for IAM but I worked for several other teams over the years and IAM is actually one of the least confusing services. But I am definitely biased and have more than average amount of experience on this particular subject. I still think the general idea is more sane than Azure Account for example. I do think this reflect on the philosophical level where whether cloud are building blocks or are they consulting projects. I personally think IAM is done right in that regard.
I know they’re all checked. What don’t know is how the results of those checks are combined to get the final result. As far as I can tell, the result is not something like OR or AND — it seems like it’s something exceedingly complex and that the output of the policy part may be more complex than just a Boolean value.
Maybe the underlying implementation is fantastic (and my distinct impression is that AWS takes this stuff far more seriously than Azure), but that doesn’t mean that the docs are easy to find or that the system actually makes sense in anything other than an agglomeration-of-backwards-compatible-layers sense.