In my mind at-least, I no longer reply to Google recruiters or consider Google as a respectable employer anymore.
I would say about half of the engineers that I personally know would never consider working for Google. But they largely reached that place years ago, so I don't think that more recent articles had anything to do with that.
Baloney or not, I've got grads from the last 3 class years telling me this.
Also, I'm specifically talking about Google. Not any other FAANG.
Google is seen as a place to park yourself at a high salary, not have any responsibility and not get much done. Almost all of them interned at Google at some point and that's how their internships went too.
Hiring seniors is tough and not a lot of companies want to pay market for them when they can get fresh meat for the feature factory and see if they get good on their own in a year or not.
It's extremely unfortunate, but for me the solution is to not work at places with hundreds+ of engineers.