I mean, I'm just sharing the practical ground truth of how a resume like yours effects recruiting in certain contexts.

Just like there are innumerable brilliant, effective engineers who would contribute tremendously to a FAANG but don't suit the modern interview funnel (leetcode, etc), smaller companies surely do miss out on strong, suitable FAANG engineers in anticipation of negative experiences they've had with others.

There are a lot of people who accumulate FAANG entries on their resume and many of them really don't suit smaller companies for a number of reasons.

Honestly, though while I'm only seeing a very narrow picture of you here, it sure sounds like you see these "tier one" companies as a desirable place to work, with prestigious colleagues and profound learning opportunities on high scale problems that just don't exist elsewhere, and surely for much more money. Are you sure you're really going to be happy somewhere else? Or might you get restless? That's precisely the kind of concern these smaller companies carry when seeing FAANG stuff on a resume, and it doesn't seem like it should be baffling that they would do.

I definitely used to. The work culture and attitudes, particularly of management, passed the breaking point for me a few years ago. I realized work was not my whole life nor did I aspire to that.

As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121594)