I just kept asking questions until I found the one she missed.
I also ended up becoming a bespoke VxWorks admin because the guy who volunteered was never available, and someone asserted my code wasn't working well on VxWorks, so of course I had to know enough to do benchmarks. I fixed a few problems but the real issue was the hard drive wasn't doing DMA due to the kernel not recognizing the processor revision number.
Somewhere between those two events I realized that if my part of the project is great but the whole project is on fire, nobody cares about my stuff. I don't get points for being right and the team being wrong. I mean, I do for some people, but I still feel bad at the end of the project, and those are the 'points' I have to live with the most.
The way that played on on the latter project is that once we got our shit together, we started work stealing from our peer orgs. Volunteering to carve off little pieces of interface between us and 'take care' of this bit of data handling here and that one over there. I came to realize that the Org subconsciously knew this and any past success they had was due to self-organization and collective work-stealing.
Throw people at it, turn a blind eye to precise mission statements, and hope for the best.
At smaller companies the title tends to be only a title and many people are basically full-stack and know a bit of everything. And you're trading hats to get jobs done.
If you truly enjoy this part of the job, you can go for a freelance career - build a network and reputation as the person you call to solve the hard stuff, and do mostly that, no leetcode interviews required...
Anyway, it sounds like you've worked in some really shitty companies / shitty people.
Especially seniors and beyond. They force leetcode interviews they somehow pass or are grandfathered through and gatekeep "trash devs" by slamming gotchas about how the whiteboarded code discussion doesn't technically compile and how "returnAverage()" isn't a method ("did you know you have to write methods before they work? What does returnAverage() supposedly even do? Return a random character in the alphabet?")
I get excited about working in different tech areas. I'm exceptional at fixing other's bugs and maintaining code. Absolutely nobody seems to be hiring for this though. It's all about college exam trivia and leetcode.
When I do get into these companies, I have to work with people throwing around casual racism with HR joining in and f-slurs like it's corporate 4chan. I ask if anyone can help look at a critical bug I discovered, and nobody speaks up. Even when it turns out it was their last code change that caused it and they are the sole master expert in this area, and they were just working on organizing their desktop instead.
"I can try to look at the SQL problem, since nobody else spoke up." Then I'm explaining the basics of SQL to some guy sitting around blank faced and it turns out he was hired because of his 10+ years of expertise in SQL. His whole job is to tackle problems like that.
Meanwhile I'm out here looking for jobs when panic cuts happen and it takes forever because I'm drained from all the gotchas and gatekeeping in these interviews.
There's no way I could live with myself if I put this experience onto others. I lose sleep when I fail to call out someone talking over a quiet person on my team. I've never seen anybody else stand up for anybody, however.