I still have sympathies for any individual contributors even if they are high paid.

No, you can’t always just magically work somewhere else. Especially not in the current job market. This is especially true when Meta has a far higher employee count than most companies. If every Meta SWE decided to quit today, the market would be flooded with employees.

Then you’ve got the problem of other companies being equally unethical. Where are they gonna work, TikTok? Google? Oracle? Who gets the ethics gold star here?

Oh come on, It is very well known that the Facebook bar to get hired is ruthless and very high, it requires studying for weeks to pass the leetcode interviews. They just decided to get the extra 20k$/year to be at Meta because this is what they wanted to optimize for.

I'm sure some of them might not have options but those are very clearly a smll minority working in niche fields. You don't get to Meta when you are a struggling engineer. You get there because you want to squeeze every single $ you can.