There are relatively large pockets of engineers making great money while coasting at a big company, but more often the engineers are actually doing a more complex job.
IT (outside of the USA) typically means Software Engineer, but in the USA the context is as you described.
I don’t know where they are located, but they might be talking about what you would call software engineering.
Netflix is operating at a higher technical level, no doubt. But the salaries can be something like 5x higher. Maybe all industries are like that but I’m not sure they are.
I'd love to see some data on this though I don't know how you'd measure it. I suspect a high percentage of west coast FAANG level jobs are low impact but also low complexity. I do figure people work more hours though. With scale comes new problems but also a lot of infrastructure and support around it.
It's pretty silly to use IT guy when there's loads of software devs working on complex stuff for critical infrastructure making less than 200k.