The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).
Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics
They did? Amazon has recently been showing their Vulkan picking robot, and Aaron Parness still seems to be at Amazon.