Installing people into senior positions does not make them better at recognizing these factors, or more incentivized to care.
The point is that a senior can use your argument to trivialize the efforts of an engineer, seem reasonable to outsiders, and be wrong.
If I'm over here spending my late nights trying to pare down our webpack bundle, but my actual day is already done because it was decided that it should be spent doing something else, then someone is liable to get frustrated with how little influence they have over the outcome or reward system. If a customer then comes back and says "oh I love how snappy it is" you can certainly pat yourself on the back for it, but you have no real control over whether that translates into compensation for your effort, either in terms of accolades or money or product direction, unless you're the one making those decisions already.
Part of the reason, in that specific case, is that not only is it hard to say as an IC what the results would be otherwise had you not done X, but also what future results might be if you were to do X again.
It's not that those choices are irrelevant or that they don't have an impact, but if you don't get to allocate company resources to it, and are hoping for a better outcome but can't control that outcome or perception of your work, then it's not worth it.
If I'm John Carmack, I'm going to care deeply about rendering performance of my game, because if it's great, I might make millions, and I get to decide that that's what my employees are optimizing for. If I'm one of those employees, I'm going to meet his expectations, and if I'm very lucky, he'll think highly of me later on. That's... it. Unless I have decent shares or something.
Likewise if you're repeatedly trying to position yourself as the tryhard, you run the risk of reducing your capacity for doing literally anything else in life, which should be a real concern, because if you're not allocating resources at the company to your time, then you're devaluing your own time and resources for no reason; burnout.
Now out yourself in the same position at a massive company that has hierarchies of managers who's sole job it is to check that the status of tickets have changed or whatever. The chance your extracurricular work will influence a better outcome for you is basically nil, because the value of anyone's job is not defined by anything related to quality.
Management that denies engineers this sense of ownership and achievement is a likely cause of burnout. I think we agree mostly agree, but in my view management shares responsibility in this case.
You own it if you own it, keep your personal investment at arms length, lest you become a Jason Bateman character desperately putting in those extra hours so one day hopefully you'll be blessed with that VP position or w/e.
That said, of course if you've achieved something within a fairly tight constraint, ideally you're compensated or recognized somehow for it. Extra worthwhile hours should also be compensated for obviously. But if nobody is willing to pay you for it, it's probably your own undoing.
What I am saying is that value in a product can be "discovered" along the way. An engineer that demonstrates how to add value through individual efforts will probably experience burnout if management chooses to ignore their efforts. But more mature managers will figure out how to work with it.
When you're a coder, the code matters. It can be frustrating to see resources allocated to say marketing.
When you are responsible for acquiring resources, then there's more to care about, more to balance. When to market. When to get new hardware.
Programmers care about code performance, code elegance, getting every pixel perfect, perfect design (for when we have s billion users). Business owners care about shipping, and getting paid. Without that the doors close.
As we grow older, as our position evolves, we have to care about more, but in some ways less deeply. There's more nuance, more compromise, more acceptance that it needs to be "good enough" - better than that even - but that perfection is an expensive goal either small returns.
I'm not arguing for mediocre, we all want the product to be better, and incrementally we move towards that. But that movement is in balance with all the other cares.