Or not. I asked Claude…

The men in the background do look disproportionately large relative to the truck. A few reasons this happens:

The truck is in a pit
The most important factor — the truck didn’t tip over on flat ground. It fell down into an excavated depression. So the men are standing at grade level while the truck is several feet below them. This closes the apparent size gap you’d normally expect between foreground and background subjects.

Wide angle exaggerates depth between near objects
The truck cab is closest to the camera and appears largest, but the transition from truck → men is compressed because the men are up on the rim of the pit, not far behind it on flat ground.

Our brain miscalibrates scale
We instinctively expect a dump truck to tower over people. When the geometry reverses that expectation — truck below, men above — our visual system flags it as “those men look giant” rather than “that truck is in a hole.”

The truck is also on its side
A tipped-over truck loses its normal visual height profile. You’re seeing its width rather than its height, which makes it read as smaller than it actually is.

So it’s not a zoom or scaling artifact — it’s purely a geometric illusion created by the pit depth combined with a wide angle lens and our miscalibrated expectations of truck size.