I think believes is the key here. There are definitely people who believe that if they can work on complex graph colouring problem in a real-time processing scenario and the interruptions are minimal - then indeed their talent is utilised well. And I can imagine such a scenario happening at Google in advertising department/division/tribe .

There are plenty of critical, unglamorous jobs which need to be done. It’s not unreasonable for an engineer to value high six figure/seven figure salaries over a feeling of work fulfillment and skill utilization

In my time Ads org had some pretty interesting engineering challenges, relatively fast promotion track and good pay

Just look at the state of almost every google project.

Yes. First rate engineers are designing rockets at Space-X