Beautifully-written post, full of insights. Thanks for sharing!

>> instead of execs telling us “you should do X”, we figure out what we think will have the most impact to our customers and work on building those features and tools

What could possibly go wrong here?

That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense.

Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.