Not trying to attack your experiences, but have you spent much time outside of FAANG?
As someone who did both (and have been at FAANG and the likes more recently), of course you will find incompetent colleagues everywhere, FAANG or not. The difference is, how many of those relative to the competent ones you will find on average.
It is a very different situation when a team of 8 has a couple incompetent devs vs. when a team of 8 has only a couple competent devs (aka the inverse).
Not trying to say that this is universally true for both FAANG and non-FAANG, exceptions apply in both cases and are based on a chance. Of course there are startups and non-tech companies that are composed almost entirely of very strong and competent devs. And there are some teams at FAANGs that are in "rest and vest" mode. But on average, that observation about the averages seemed to be true based on my personal experiences.
