this strikes me as an unnecessarily rude dismissal of the difficulty of engineering at scale
this might sound crazy, but some people are actually just good at their jobs and will, naturally, progress quicker than others.
If FB goes down, people waste less time online[0], if a guidance system fails people may die.
[0] yes, of course there are people whose livelihood depends on cat memes, but I'm making a generic example.
Goes down yes, but what about a data breach? What if, for example, the location of a woman is mistakenly exposed to a abusive partner?
In my view the distinction between a senior software engineer and not is the ability to see how both human and software systems interact and find failure modes that others may miss.
by definition it's not true, and any sequence of thoughts that lead you to that conclusion are wrong, period.