Drawing a parallel to Nassim Taleb's "don't hide the risk" (or atleast what I understood from his talks), working for a big corp hides risk (and reward). If you or the team do a shitty job, the feedback and the results are often not immediate, and absorbed by the bigness of the corp. I have seen fair share of disinterest and mediocrity in my place of work and I think it's a leadership problem partly, where they've pretty much failed to motivate or incentivize people to improve/move around the company and you have people working for years in the same role and project doing the same work, creating very little new value.

Also great point that it might be a characteristic of somebody choosing to work for a big corp vs something else. In today's climate that seems a very safe decision for a new grad. Ultimately it's a job that you do to earn money, it's naive to think everybody wants the same thing from their job.