But when discussing the entire job market, it's a minuscule fraction of tech workers who could even get there if they tried (sometimes due to no fault of their own e.g. location), and it's a much smaller number that even get there at all.
Hitting L7 in mid 30s and catching a massive bull market to pump up compensation is mythical unicorn levels of lucky. It does happen to some people, but it's not useful at all when discussing realistic expectations even 95th percentile developers in the general population.
Getting into a bubble with top FAANG engineers can really distort perceptions of what the market looks like for the median developer.
Maybe I should just grind leetcode for a few months (my dynamic-programming algo skills are a bit rusty) and switch jobs. I would miss the 30 days of PTO though.
From another point of view - design and behavioral questions original goal is to confirm that candidate have related experience from day to day work, so if you have enough practice on your current job - it is not so much time to prepare for design and behavioral part of interviews.
You're right that there's a ceiling somewhere, but the ceiling is (or at least has been) ludicrously high for the past decade or so in big tech in the US.