I've worked at a few different teams between some startups and Target, and I can tell you that the variance team-to-team is massive. I've been lucky to avoid anywhere that's been truly toxic, but even just at Target there's been a big gap between one team that was basically perfect and I enjoyed both work and life immensely and a different team that, while not awful, has definite problems and resulted in unnecessary stress.

So not much concrete to say except that great teams do exist, might come up in surprising places (I never expected to find one at Target!) and that team-to-team variance swamps company-to-company variance. It's a complicated function of your immediate team and manager as well as upper management and broader company culture.

People can be legitimately afraid of revenge by a company or specific people.

Certainly met a few characters that enjoy going out of their way to hurt others.

Yes, huge tech companies have lots of orgs and teams, which means there won't be one singular culture. Some teams will be toxic, some won't, some will be in between. Certain huge companies will have more "good" teams than "bad" ones. Then you have places like Amazon, where bad teams are the norm, and good ones are exceptions.

I'm not going to name names, but companies like this that normalise bullying and overwork to the point of staff breaking are not the norm.

Thinking about my own experience and the people I know, this would describe at most 25% of jobs (most of that being overwork).

What places did you work?