These roles aren't opposed at all, they greatly benefit each other :-)

Bringing what used to be the privilege of upper management (wasting massive amounts of resources while getting paid handsomely) down to software developers.

It's that trickle-down effect people talked about, right?

It's a beautiful symbiosis.

Hah, yes. I will say that while I understand the general disdain here, as I grew more senior in my career I realized the world takes all types. There are "doers" who will rush to an end goal that's highly prioritized and then there's "optimizers" who come fix that mess up into a durable, cost-effective system. Some people are gifted enough in knowledge and have the right business priority to do both at the same time, but usually they're required at different times.

Anecdotally, optimization tasks (in this brain) are multitudes easier than innovation tasks. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do things differently whereas optimization utilizes many lessons I've learned over and over again with well-trodden patterns. That's to say, I'm grateful for the doers :)