It's this. Actually doing work is seen as simple and unworthy of a higher-level engineer.
Good engineers focused on problems (fixing complex bugs in distributed systems, adding fallbacks and failovers, improving the UI or performance of internal tools, etc) can add significant value to the company...but they won't be rewarded for it, because the perf process considers those to be simple, the domain of lower-level employees.
What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company.
Of course, people with those planning and communication skills are really valuable to a company. But somebody also has to do the work. Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet. And a lot of effective engineers getting frustrated and quitting because they don't want to spend their days working on slide shows.
It feels to me like the people in charge of the perf process just tend to overemphasize their own strengths and skills. Kinda by definition, the people designing the system are going to be senior people who are interested in communication and process, so that's what they look for in others. If they were the kinds of people who were interested in identifying and solving particularly devious or consequential issues on their own (or as part of one of their peer's projects), they wouldn't be working on the promo process in the first place.
