Scientific programming, hardware interfacing, embedded, demoscene, game engines, HFT or HPC calls for much different breed of code, and generally way harder to formulate in code w.r.t. these enterprise projects. Trying to make hardware go faster with more efficient code is much harder than optimizing an SQL query and safeguarding it, and these are well understood problems, in general.

If you just mean a large company, I would say they do exist - though it may take some looking for them.

You can find them in companies that have to deal with "real" things (hardware, factories, production lines), or where there is an interest in taking advantage of emerging technology (advertising, e-commerce)

I would call my current project relatively systems-level too, as it's a network proxy. Not quite kernel level but definitely not trivial "if this then that" style coding.

My perspective is that application programming - CRUD, forms, IO orchestration - was always vulnerable, even before AI. Think about APIs for payments, APIs for subscriptions. E-commerce in a box type solutions.

That's why I always pushed to do more systems level work, on more exotic or weird technologies. It's not because I think I'm a better programmer, than someone slinging Spring code or React forms. But because in this industry it's better to be a goat than a cow.