I dunno, maybe? It's tough to compare alternate realities. I had equity in the company that paid out well, had a base over 200k, 30% EOY bonus, was leading a team of 6, fully remote work, no on-call. Certainly there are areas I'm weaker in than I would be if I worked in a FAANG-style corporation (only doing minor work with microservices, not doing much with distributed computing), but the job was quite different than what I did when I was first hired out of college.
Frankly, I felt mentally and socially challenged enough while also being compensated more than fairly. If that means I've got a junior role while also avoiding toxic large-scale organizational dysfunction then I'm down to make that trade-off every day.
