The author (Tim) appears to be in Germany; under German copyright law he in principle has the moral right to be identified as the author of any computer program he writes, just as it if were a book or piece of music.

Unlike other types of work, this isn't necessarily true elsewhere (eg in the US & UK), but I understand moral rights originate from France and German and are especially strong there.

(I see that page now mentions "Credits: CloudWatch Synthetics Recorder is based on the Headless recorder. " - is that new? )

Surely the answer is "of course you can", just tack on "all media mentions must have an approved attribution without which all license terms are null and void" to any license and viola!?

It would be nice if that were incorporated into a well-known, publicized, and lawyer-vetted license.

The problem is if I tack it on myself, nobody will ever touch or use my code even in the ways I want them to, because people fear obscure licenses if they don't have lawyers.

If I release code as GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, people will use it without second thoughts. IF I release code as "BSD with modifications" people will look at it with suspect eyes.

The effect I want to have is NOT to prevent large companies from using my code. In fact I want to encourage them to use it, but to also publicly mention me along with its use, which would be very valuable to career-building and job seeking. That way, when writers of open source code aren't offered jobs by the companies that use that code, at least they gain high visibility for other companies to want to hire them.

That's like the old "BSD License Advertising Clause"