I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.

At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.

</rant>

IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.

Lean, fast, agile (not in that way, in the real definition of the word) start ups hiring people who are fleeing a FAANG, only to have those FAANGers implement exactly what they left will always seem strange to me

Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year