Usually they jump into the projects that have more visibility or hype, focus their work on the aspects the org considers most valuable for the "next step in the ladder" and jump ship to a different team/project/department as soon as possible.
I've seen that both on engineering and product sides, most of the people I worked with that progressed quickly in their career weren't actually reliable, at least not reliable to the people they worked closely with: they jumped ship to other teams/parts of the org as soon as possible, leaving just a trail of half-done initiatives that were just good enough to tick the boxes needed for a promotion.
Doing a good job is secondary to this, sometimes doing a good job aligns with the box-ticking, sometimes it doesn't really matter. If you are decent at salesmanship and persuasion, and can get some visibility from the upper echelons the actual delivery will only matter in 1-2 years, by then they're already out and up.
There are few small companies where this could work, otherwise dont rely on it, you will end up very sad.
So say that in case A you get hired to maintain an old system that is on the path to deprecation, and in case B you get hired to work in a greenfield initiative that ends up exploding and generating tons of revenue. Even if you do the same good job in both cases, you are almost certainly going to be rewarded and promoted faster in the second case.
The key is that this compounds. If you have a higher job level, you tend to get better opportunities that help you grow further, which in turn means more promotions and/or bigger opportunities.