I've seen people from small companies playing the tech lead or manager roles, move into google as "Senior Software Engineer" or whatever equivalent - basically writing code again. And the reason is in your edit. In fact a lot of the "hot shots" at small startups that play nice with the boss and can wrangle Jira but were actually excellent coders - can't do the politics at the big companies.

Part of that is that the big companies typically hire suits to do management - which were basically the jocks in high school that always got the girl... that type - they run everything in the world now. Loud mouth tech bro asshole types.