I've worked in teams of 3 and teams of 300.
Neither is better. They're different games entirely.
In a small company, you touch everything. Deployment, customer calls, hiring, the lot. You make real decisions because there's nobody else to make them. The learning is brutal and fast.
In a large company, you get to think. You can run experiments that would sink a startup. You have specialists to learn from. Failure doesn't threaten the project.
Here's what took me years to understand: the real advantage comes from experiencing both.
When you've only worked in one environment, you don't know what you're missing. You assume the way things work is the way things have to work.
Move from a startup to an enterprise and suddenly you see the value of process, documentation, and thinking beyond next week. Move the other way and you realise how much faster decisions can happen when there's no committee.
Every company is different, but the comparison itself is the education. You start recognising patterns. You bring ideas that seem obvious to you but revolutionary to teams who've never seen another way.
The engineers and leaders I've worked with who grew fastest didn't just climb a ladder in one place. They moved between both environments. Not constantly, but deliberately and carried the lessons with them.