This hasn’t been my experience at Big Tech (in ~20 years). There’s plenty of projects I’ve shipped that didn’t have upper management support but after the user feedback or metrics were positive they got counted as a win. There’s also many smaller projects that you can ship without anyone paying much attention but they can still be valuable either to some subset of users or in aggregate. For example, +1% on some metric isn’t going to get you a call out from the VP but do that every month and now you’re talking about big aggregate gains.