There is a larger technical culture and corporate political element with a strong undercurrent of budgets that has more to do with "products and innovate" at these non-BigTech companies, than someone from leading edge BigTech might be used to. BigTech companies also have such characteristics in most teams, but those leading edge teams due to incentives get all the public relations press internally and even externally.
Many of my non-BigTech clients have some full time staff who are plenty proficient in technical matters to seek BigTech employment. However, the rank and file staff of developers are almost invariably majority outsourced H1B's for budgetary reasons. This sets up a perverse incentive.
No matter how much the developers might agree with the advanced concepts promulgated by the full time staff developers, at the end of the day their outsourcing companies' contract renewals rely upon how many tasks assigned to them get "done" on time. And the project managers / scrum masters / etc. all the way up to and including middle management do not act upon the full-timers' advice (pretty basic, like build security and SRE in from the beginning) and encode it into the definition of "done" because they don't directly benefit from doing so.
There are ways to fix this situation, but they don't directly involve fancy tech or tech stacks.
In other words it is not purely management who are responsible for most user-hostile interfaces, ethically dubious business models (how to optimise gaming addiction) or bloated infrastructure (kubernetes when it is not needed,...), highly-skilled tech folks need to own up for these low-interest rate phenomena as well.
My guess at the parent commenter's presupposition would be that they had been overpaid and will now be forced to work for normal wages. At those lower wages, it might become economical to employ them, while those same people weren't economical at silicon-valley-scale wages.
They might be able to for example go work for a company that produces objects, and then sells them to consumers in exchange for money. Then the value of their skills will be a little more obvious I guess.