I'd say local code quality is generally good but overall it's a big hodge podge of small features duct-taped together, so the whole app becomes a tangled mess. The metric driven culture tends to emphasize impact, not diffs landed.
Have you ever used facebook.com? At least the frontend is incredibly slow (on a thousands of € machine), so that's not synonym with quality in my experience.
They mean locally as in code scope and not necessarily client sided or the size of a feature
You put these little nuggets of impact on your performance review.