I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.

But practically every "competitive" software job uses stack ranking that's mostly centered on an individual team or a few teams where 20% of the people have to be given a bad rating regardless of objective performance.