I worked at Meta and they're spot on.

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.

People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.

Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.

The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.

For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.