I've never even lived in the United States, but I strongly doubt this is always true.

"generally downgrade you significantly unless you designed systems that operate at massive scale" maybe at Netflix/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook.

But what about Apple?

Apple makes phones.

I'm sure all that matters at the end of the day is that the career growth and the remuneration means you just have to be Good At Your Job, and jump through whatever job interview loops are put up for you.

Maybe Google/Facebook/Amazon have Godzilla hiring pipelines for university graduates into distributed systems, but the world is not as simple as you would think.