(1) made me chuckle. I've worked at nearly every FAANG including Meta. These companies aren't nearly as advanced or competent as you think.

I no longer work at Meta, but in my mind a more likely scenario than (1) is: a senior engineer proposes a 'Decryption at Scale' framework solely to secure their E6 promo, and writes a 40-page Google Doc to farm 'direction' points for PSC. Five PMs repost this on Workplace to celebrate the "alignment" so they can also include it in their PSCs.

The TL and PMs immediately abandon the project after ratings are locked because they already farmed the credit for it. The actual implementation gets assigned to an E4 bootcamp grad who is told by a non-technical EM to pivot 3 months in because it doesn't look like 'measurable impact' in a perf packet. The E4 gets fired to fill the layoff quota and everyone else sails off into the sunset.