Any big tech co worth its salt acknowledges the outsized impact a single engineer can make and rewards them appropriately. The important thing here is defining "impact" and "influence". As a standard L4 / SDE-2 engineer, you can have enough impact to make a company like Amazon several 10s of millions of dollars year in and year out. Sure you can't change the strategy of a trillion dollar company, but very few people can claim to have such an outsized impact and still complain about it. It might be adding some prime badges here and some ads there, or improving a recommendations algorithm by 1% but given the scale at which they operate, a 0.25% win in conversion rate because of an idea you've had / executed is enough to drive 10s of millions of dollars in top-line revenue. In terms of technical impact, L4s generally have a fair share of interesting problems to work on - reducing latencies, saving fleet costs, solving recurring bugs are all well rewarded.
- As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).
- As a Principal Engineer - your influence has to stretch across an entire org.
You can vaguely say "oh but I don't care about making my employer gobs of money or solving somewhat interesting problems" but then you'd have to define impact in engineering terms.