> surely the folks who are pulling those kinds of salaries are working on really interesting problems > ... > The really hard problems that my org faces arent the same league of hard problems that someone at a FAANG company (or similar) is working on

You'd be surprised. What I work on is relatively mundane. I worked at multiple FAANG companies in the past and the work there is mostly mundane too.

For the most part the difference is in the order of magnitude of users that you have, so you get to look at edge cases more often, need to be more careful about having a stable codebase etc, but writing a Web service that gets X in input and spits out Y in output is not rocket science.

I think the carpenter/woodworker analogy for software engineering works pretty well. The very expensive carpenters do the same work as the inexpensive ones, the difference is in the details.