In terms of cool tech, Apple/Google absolutely are a cut above Facebook now in my experience. Microsoft used to be below, now they rose as they embraced more open source and modern tech, I'd probably put Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon even in the cool category these days while Facebook was stereotypically above Microsoft before. Amazon, depends who you ask for a definition of "cool" from more so.
I would wager that at all of these companies, how “cool” your job is depends heavily on your specific team and role. I’m sure there are thousands of people with very uncool jobs at Google, and thousands of people with very cool jobs at FB. Comparing two companies of that size and saying one is cooler than the other is probably an oversimplification.
That being said, I share your perception that Google and Apple are cooler than FB. :)
I think your wager is completely accurate. With Amazon as an example, depending on your team you could find yourself doing high-performance work in cutting edge languages on a globally distributed high-availability FaaS platform, or you could be using Perl 5.8 to make tweaks to a website that will only be displayed in certain parts of India.
I am sure that people are still super psyched to work at FAIR and Oculus, but those teams are quite small and AFAIK don't hire using the standard FB SDE hiring process.
