Absolutely. I've come to believe that this is the nature of money i.e. an abstraction for power.

Power is meaningless unless you're hurting somebody: otherwise, what even is the point? Money is abstracted power. For this reason, ANYWHERE you are seeing accumulations of vast amounts of money, somebody or something is being hurt.

In this case it appears to be that the whole 'make 500k as a dev' thing, which has always seemed weird to me, turns out to be 'FAANG is trying to control all access to devs worth having, after which they can starve the market and do whatever they want'. It comes down to power, always.

You'll note that the open source devs upon which their internet relies, upon which so much rests, are NOT making 500k as devs. If you're doing something worth doing and it's not harming but helping, you are not getting paid. If you're getting paid in a big way, you're doing something that enables harming somebody, whether it's people or a more abstracted thing like a market. The wealthy FAANG folks are part of a situation where an employment market is being harmed, and that's why the money is there for them.

It's a weapon. Otherwise it would not be there.

I don't think it's that simple. Google needs devs, it's a competitive market. Controlling or limiting the dev supply is definitely a benefit for big tech, but it's a separate benefit. I think competitive pressure on salaries is the top forcing function.

Google & friends have a business where they can turn a $500k engineer into $2M+ in revenue

I think that's really the bottom line here. They aren't overpaying to starve out the industry, although I'm sure they're perfectly happy to benefit from that indirectly

Yeah, I find it really weird that people are seriously entertaining this conspiracy theory, when the more mundane explanation is that, on average, tech workers generate insane profit.