I use it. It's the only way (I know of) to get Amazon to do support for kernel issues. Even as compared to Redhat, they will take a look at live crashed instances having problems...nobody else has that access. And as far as I know, they use it too, and perform quality assurance on it on their platform. Solution or workaround for that class of bugs is not particularly portable to other Linux distributions.
In general, I have found Amazon Linux an easier target in most respects: one can drop workarounds to cope with the ancientness of CentOS6. Notably, access to new libraries (e.g. libcurl) allow easier updates to libraries like gdal or geos with fewer patches to cope with old compilers (by installing gcc64-c++). It also tends to have new kernels that are lightly modified to deal with specific issues (per changelog).
Amazon Linux however, different, and makes releases that move rather quickly. It's rather closer to Fedora in a way.
Sometimes, as with programming languages, they are fairly fastidious at separating out old versions of packages (e.g. pip-3.4, pip-3.5, pip-3.6 for Python), and for better or worse, sometimes, in cases like gcc, libevent, libcurl, or boost, they'll Just Upgrade.
So, in this case, you can fix the build by dropping the "2" in the package name. They seem to have relegated libevent 1.4 to "compat-libevent"