Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG
And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.
There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.
It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.
This is especially true for Meta.
Once it turns into a giant bureaucracy with people you've never met judging a promo packet by rubrics, while they're unfamiliar with your whole org.. the incentives get diffierent.
It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.
It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.
... after Nvidia.
there's still plenty of people not on that grind trying to make whatever thing nearby them work, or have other career goals than promotion or money
that promo option getting people who want to build a bunch of junk out of the way and into positions where they arent building stuff might be relevant to why those companies are succeeding