You'd be arguing wrong imo. No one sits down solo and has to design a system to scale in isolation,and if you do then something up the chain from that moment went very wrong.
It's a pointless academia by proxy situation that encourages filling out teams with the kids of people who csn architect and tinker forever but have no capability to actually deliver software anyone wants to use. This becomes more clear when you look across the last 10 years in FAANG and list out what products have actually been delivered that are improvements to users and customers vs what's just infrastructure padding and bought in though acquisition.
In both FAANG jobs I had I was expected to design systems solo, and then review them with my team. If the system is complex enough, I would probably whiteboard it first with some teammates while I was designing it.
It is something that was asked of me in interviews, and comes up often in my day to day job. And being able to design systems, and to help review systems others are designing, is probably the single biggest impact thing I do regularly.
It is more useful in day to day than the algorithmic knowledge that was also asked of me during interviews. While there are people that do use complex algorithms in both companies, most software of Google is converting a protocol buffer into another protocol buffer, and in Amazon is the same thing but with JSON. If you are a frontend engineer, you might convert into HTML by plugging the values into a template engine.
