Good luck convincing Google (or Netflix / Amazon / Microsoft / any other major company) that anything they do is 'just a CRUD application'. Even when it's true, they'll never admit it.
It's pretty easy to make a bag of garbage; it's non-trivial to make 100M bags of garbage.
Even if they're making CRUD apps, making tons of high-availability CRUD apps that work against dozens of services your team doesn't own that can serve huge fractions of the globe requires non-trivial coordination and skill. (Not that all those companies do is CRUD apps, but even if.)
I'm not sure it's as jard as those companies make it out to be -- but it's not "just CRUD apps", it's the logistics of CRUD apps spanning the globe.