High-level does have the advantage that your work is more easily understood by non-technical / management types - and that could have a positive effect on promotions. Let's say you glue a bunch of AWS services together to solve a business problem: in contrast to solving some technical hurdle to do with obscure hardware. The former will definitely be easily understood by more people, and I hazard to say actually has a large impact on a business (in most cases?)

Low-level programming does scratch that itch of "hacking" stuff, although I have had satisfaction with glueing stuff together with Python in interesting ways.