How valuable are your coops

My friend and I are on our first work term right now and we're both somewhat disappointed by our experiences. We're wondering if co-ops are just like this or if other people find it more valuable.

For some context, I was going to do development at a big company while my friend had high hopes going into a faang program that's supposed to be good.

For me, I'm working on a project and self-learning what I need to know as I do it, which is good but I can do that on my own anyways - there's nothing special about the learning experience that I can't get on my own besides the fact that they own the IP I produce and they tell me how they want the product to be.

For my friend, he seems to be getting really pissed off from the job, much more than me, because of 1. access issues (they tell him to do something but access issues block his way and it's really painful to work through), 2. he doesn't give a flying damn about the project & team he's matched with 3. he's assigned front-end work that he has to do, but find boring but has to do it 4. the tech stack is old and unexciting 5. it's not like the whole team is "passionate" about what they do, it's just work to them 6. just not learning anything new.

So I'm wondering if coop is just a means to make money ("work is work") or is it actually a very valuable learning experience for you guys. We see the value of mining the company name for exit opportunities in our early coop days, but we're not sure how miserable of a life you actually have by working in industry. Do you grow, do you learn? Or is the nature of co-op just exchange of labour for hourly wage?