This statement is broadly true across bigCo industry from what I've found, but I'd assign an "obvious explanation" to why: New features are recognized for prom

This statement is broadly true across bigCo industry from what I've found, but I'd assign an "obvious explanation" to why: New features are recognized for promos far more than existing improvements. I wouldn't say it's a new vs old dev thing other than that old devs need "broader impact" to justify promos and thus can't really take low hanging fruit, (although I've certainly seen senior devs ramp up significant projects just so they get "novel visibility" even if it's reinventing the wheel these tend to be slower by their very nature and often not as visible as the more top level feature bloat) it seems more to do with the culture of how career progress is measured throughout industry. (A culture that I personally think is extremely broken, but see very little to fixing outside of starting my own company)