Sounds like you are talking about how to get and keep a CTO position and not how to do well in it. I'd argue that the most important role for a CTO is to shape

Sounds like you are talking about how to get and keep a CTO position and not how to do well in it. I'd argue that the most important role for a CTO is to shape the engineering culture. A famous example is Jeff Bezos mandating that teams expose their interfaces via externalizable API's, he was a CEO but this was definitely a CTO move. He wouldn't have been able to make this mandate if he wasn't a good engineer himself, and that mandate lead to AWS which is where most of their current profits comes from. I think this is why founders are so important and why big corporations will never be able to compete with startups, people who are better at solving problems than playing politics will simply be unable to climb the corporate hierarchies so they will only lead companies as founders.