When I was at IBM, I was hired in as a STSM (band 10; the next level up was DE). One of the huge handicaps I had for being parachuted into a very large company at a relatively high level was that I had to work extra hard to establish my "network" with other STSM's and DE's. There was a certain amount of automatic "if you are a STSM, then automatically your BozoBit is false"), but since there were stories of STSM's who had retired in place, it certainly wasn't an automatic grant of credibility.

So your concept of "Real Googler" is (a) not as binary as you make it out to be, and (b) it is a reality in any large company, and indeed, in our entire industry. (You think someone like Guido van Rossum worries about promotions, or doesn't get the pick of which jobs he wants? :-)

If you don't have a good network, where your competence and your work is known outside of your local team, then yes, you are largely dependent on your manager in terms advocating for you for your promotions, and it will be harder to convince another manager in another team to advocate for an exception to the general rules of thumb of transferring early after being hired (yes, it does happen, and yes, it is an exception, and yes there are some really good reasons for that guideline to be in place). I can't speak to whether or not you had a good manager or not[1], but for someone who is more junior, of course your experience at a company is going to be more dependent on whether you had a good manager or not --- that's true everywhere! I can say that all of the managers I've had at Google have been excellent, and they all have had a very similar attitude that which was expressed by Matt Welsh --- the attitude of "servant leadership", where your goal is to remove obstacles that are getting in the way of those who work for you, and for whom you are very glad to shower credit upon them, because a high functioning team reflects well on the manager and on the tech lead.

[1] I can't speak to this because I'm not familiar with your local team or who your manager was; I only saw your behavior on a company-wide engineering mailing list.

Bottom line? If you want to get ahead, you need to establish your competence and your value to other technical people in your company, and in your industry. You don't do this by putting down people who are well known in the company and in the industry, and you don't do this by asserting that you have executive level vision and bemoaning the fact that no one is willing to listen to you and willing to grasp how brilliant you are. No, you put your head down, and you do good work, and you help other people.

I may be the ext4 maintainer, and I may be well known, but far more often than not I'm reviewing other people's code, fixing up other people's code, fixing bugs, and helping users. There's a huge amount of grunt work involved, and I'm happy to do it and I'm happy to shower credit on people at other companies who have invested time and energy making ext4 better. That's how you get ahead in the world, not by asserting how great you are and by putting down other engineers and/or other companies. Other people will be able to very quickly draw their own conclusions.