Well, no, transit isn't dead. But when your traffic volume rises to one of the top N -- let's say, N approximates 10 -- sources/destinations of the entire Internet, you discover it's cheaper to run your own global networks.
And that's what Google, Facebook, and Amazon, at the very least, have done: bought fiber, hired network engineers, and designed things that work efficiently for them. If YouTube is 90% of Google's traffic, it's not surprising that Google's network looks like a CDN. Amazon wants to interconnect their AWS datacenters to lower their internal traffic costs. Facebook wrote a new routing protocol (Open/R).
CDNs are simply good architecture -- in any good system, you have multiple tiers of storage, and web systems are no different. Multiple tiers of storage providing caching over intermediate links which may be saturated -- this is a pretty common model for logistics whether you're talking data or packages.
Also, all of the companies you list purchase interconnects or CDN services from large ISPs. So Amazon has a datacenter in Chicago that has a direct fiber connection to Comcast and Verizon networks, for example, that hosts a copy of its CDN endpoints. CDNs are ridiculously easy to build these days; I helped design the build-out of a CDN for a major ISP and we just used off-the-shelf open source software. The hardest part of the project was getting the purchase orders through my client's procurement process. In my mind, that means the engineering here is so uninteresting as to be commoditized -- which means that this is a business problem, not a technical one.
So transit is disappearing, but direct interconnects to big ISPs are just taking their place. On one hand, it's hard to argue against -- it's the right technical solution and there isn't a better option. But at the same time, it concentrates control to a worrying degree, especially as media, telecom and software continue to converge.
Not sure this is the case, amz data centres to other amz data centres in most cases you go across ntt, Tata etc. Google on the other hand is different e.g. Taiwan to Ireland all google network. Spin up vms and traceroute
Careful: lack of middle hops in a traceroute isn't necessarily sign that there are no transit providers. Many times a carrier/enterprise may rent overlay (i.e., MPLS) transport capacity which won't appear in your traceroute.
Although, in Google's specific case, you are probably right and this does not apply.
And that's what Google, Facebook, and Amazon, at the very least, have done: bought fiber, hired network engineers, and designed things that work efficiently for them. If YouTube is 90% of Google's traffic, it's not surprising that Google's network looks like a CDN. Amazon wants to interconnect their AWS datacenters to lower their internal traffic costs. Facebook wrote a new routing protocol (Open/R).