The part that is arguable is whether or not smaller organizations could accomplish the same.
I have a hypothesis that it's literally just LOC. The more lines of code, the more SWE you need to be stewards of that code, the bigger the bureaucracy.
My hyothesis is that all these "simple" lines of code that are 1000s and 1000s of lines of code, are actually a burden and produce bureaucracy.
1) cooperation and altruism produces more effective companies
2) ...but machiavellianism produces more individual reward from a company
Which is why the corporate values of any McBig McOrg reflect #1 but day to day is inevitably #2 is what actually happens. Everyone is doing #2 while pretending to do #1, or couching it in terms of #1.
For techies, it is absolutely necessary for you to realize what is going on in companies, since our lot is the ones that generally want to avoid middle management machiavellianism and just concentrate on producing value.
Yes, that is exactly the premise! "Don't hate the player, hate the game", etc.
Luckily for all of us there are multiple games we can play.
It seems like the premise is "To succeed in bureaucratic companies you must become a bureaucrat".
But what I witness is every company that becomes beureacratic dies. And it dies to smaller companies that do more/better with a thousandth the headcount. And I see this natural selection as a good thing.
Maybe if your only goal is to be the vulture sucking money out of a terminal dinosaur these are good skills to adapt. But I think it's better to join a place that isn't lost to meaningless metrics and do work that's valuable to the customer and explain it to other humans in human ways (with a reasonable amount of measurement).