I think we'll have to agree to disagree. My takeaway from much of Larson's writing is that staff engineers can do the line work required to launch new product lines, but generally don't, because the impacts of their strategic work is much higher than that of line style coding.

They direct and advise on technical strategy, but delegate execution to others, because having the 10k foot view is typically more valuable when deployed on strategic opportunities.

I think you're missing what the above is saying, i.e. that the featured article uses staff in a different way than Larson and most discussions around "staff".

Will and this article use "staff" in a completely different sense. The author of the post even acknowledges this difference in his HN comment at the top of this post.

Will uses "Staff Software Engineer" as the rank of Staff (I.e. one above Senior).

This article uses "staff engineer" not as the rank, but as the type of engineer (Line vs staff).