Well pointed out Brad — to be clear I wasn’t suggesting that all usage of drawer navigation was considered “lazy” but more so that many products use it unneccessarily as the primary source of navigation and ultimately de-emphasizes core navigational pivots users engage most often.

At the end of the day there are many retailers (i.e. Amazon that you mentioned above) which depend on these scrollable menus to satisfy the breadth of options they have which have relatively equal weighting or are unneccessary to clutter the primary experience with. BUT….even Amazon (and others) don’t rely primarily on drawer navigation and leverage other paradigms such as in-line navigation, direct navbar iconography, search, etc. to support the primary usage of the experience.

Yelp is a great example of a platform with wide range of products/views which they solved with in-line navigation combined with an intelligent navbar to provide users with more transparency into these ingress points.

There is certainly no one-size-fits-all, but there is no denying that many platforms cram critical functionality into a ambiguous menu icon at the expense of the user experience.

Cheers, Sean.