Clean OS install or new hardware should both be daily events at even mid sized companies. Because even if it’s once every 2-4 years per developer that still becomes extremely common in aggregate.

I think the tech giants have warped some people's expectations of what a "mid-sized" company is. I work for a mid-sized company where we roll our own ERP system and we probably average about two clean OS installs per year across the entire development team.

Yes, but GP said "every engineer, regularly" which seems odd.

I suspect lots of junior devs will clone fresh, push changes, nuke repo and repeat. I did when i was young instead of syncing state and rebasing.