Superficially, FAANG offering massive compensation packages to anyone who fits their model of "Stanford/MIT degree, willing to suffer through LeetCode challenges", which has a massive effect on the market for SWE, as it changes the bar for what's _possible_ in the realm of compensation, and ensures that the cartel gets its pick of SWE talent, simply because it can offer substantially more than most other companies.
Interestingly, those companies are also the ones that I think have put the most effort into quantifying the value of a software developer to the business as a whole. The salaries look obscene to many people, but the cartel pays them because it believes it's getting more value than it's paying for.
That's... not a cartel though? A cartel is a group of firms conspiring to artificially control the supply of some good in order to increase its price, what you described is just several independent firms that have a high demand for workers and are bidding up salaries for them.
It was more cartel-like when Apple and Google were conspiring to keep tech salaries down by setting salary caps.
Don't forget the 50-60 hr real workweeks (more than 10% of the search team I was on was always working 11pm-12pm midnight). Turnover is actually pretty high at Google. My whole team (9 people) quit in the year that I left.
Interestingly, those companies are also the ones that I think have put the most effort into quantifying the value of a software developer to the business as a whole. The salaries look obscene to many people, but the cartel pays them because it believes it's getting more value than it's paying for.