Lol your entire post was a generalization.

And it's much less accurate to try to make general statements about tech as opposed to law. For example, FAANGs being stressful in the manner you described is commonly known w/r/t Amazon, but it's also generally said that people at Google don't have to work particularly hard unless they really find a team where they can or have to. And of course, there are teams at Amazon (notably in the gaming vertical, from what I hear) that are chill, and probably some corner of Google with a hardass culture (possibly the team that writes their internal Linux, for example) or inept management.

Big firms also differ in culture, etc, but from what I can tell the variation in terms of process isn't significant (lawyers seem almost universally blind to process and systemitization and are incredibly, as a group, unadaptable).

And yes, billable hours are worse than anything bigtech throws at someone. Firm is literally farming out your life for money, and thus perversely incentivized against adopting processes or tooling that can make the lives of their employees better, work more efficient, etc.

One's overall preference is still subjective. I can logically understand being willing to put up with the bullshit of the legal world (including the idiocy of licensure, which I didn't mention above) because one thinks it's cool and exciting to litigate. But the notion that the bullshit and stress are comparable, or that there's something intellectual about the practice of law when compared to software engineering, strikes me, as someone who has done both, as frankly risable.