You admit to this and then asks how you didn't see or hear more about it?
I worked for 8 companies in the past 16 years, across 2 different countries. From these 8 I'll exclude 2 of them that were very early-stage startups I joined to help some former colleagues or friends (the experience was great nonetheless but not representative).
From the other 6 I'd rate that 2 were really toxic, 2 were great and the remaining 2 were completely mixed, depending very much on what part (and/or team) of the company you worked at.
The toxicity ranges from: verbal (and once physical) abuse; constant gaslighting from higher management; immature (and hyper emotional) bosses and/or peers; C-level trying to use divide-and-conquer tactics, spreading false rumours about people talking about others behind their backs, making two teams work on the same feature and dumping the losers; immature management inducing micromanagement, to the point of scheduling HR meetings to berate people if they forgot to complete every 15 minutes time-slot of a timesheet; and so many more instances of toxicity.
You just get used to it at some places, it desensitises you, it's easy to cope by going numb. It doesn't need to happen constantly, just often enough to start to affect you mentally. At one place the toxicity was always in slow burn but after 2-3 years employees would drop like flies from burn out.
There are definitely a lot of toxic places and people around. I'm very glad you didn't have to experience it.
Verbal abuse as in: a C-level calling one engineer a "dumb motherfucker, lying to my face" and variations of that over time. An IT manager telling his employees (a team of about 6 people) that they should be grateful for having a job, that as stupid as they were it was a blessing they could still work with him and learn. A shouting match between two engineers, banging meeting room doors, shouting across the hall.
Physical abuse, founder of the company slapped an engineer on the face when the engineer refused to implement a feature that wasn't only unethical, it was criminally fraudulent. The engineer raised that concern, they got into a discussion, the engineer called the founder a criminal and got slapped on the face.
You've never seen two competing teams on the same feature become toxic? What about when one team starts to actively sabotage the other? And actively bullying them to further demoralise the team after they started to falter behind due to the sabotaging? I've seen that.
You have 20 years of career, I have 16, we both have been through office politics, needlessly bureaucracy and lots of other unpleasant things that I wouldn't ever consider toxic, so please believe me, there is some really toxic stuff.
I feel you are trying to counter something I've said and I don't understand what, or why.
one alternative might be that you’re a little toxic?
who knows. doesn’t make everyone else’s lived experiences invalid :)