Daniel, I'm a big fan of yours but disagree with this take :).
It's definitely a database. The modeling principles are different, and you won't get some of the niceties you get with a RDBMS, but it still allows for flexible querying and more.
S3 and DDB are incredibly similar. Their fundamental operators are the same: key-value get/put and ordered list, and their consistency is roughly the same.
What differentiates DDB and S3 the most is cost and performance.
They're both highly-durable primitive data structures in the cloud, with a few extra features attached.
It's definitely a database. The modeling principles are different, and you won't get some of the niceties you get with a RDBMS, but it still allows for flexible querying and more.
S3 is not a database, but DynamoDB is :).