I don't think it's a skills thing, it's a time thing. Personally, I work as the architect/leadership level, but I'm still pretty handy at DevOps, SRE, RE, Back

I don't think it's a skills thing, it's a time thing. Personally, I work as the architect/leadership level, but I'm still pretty handy at DevOps, SRE, RE, Back end, and have even delivered a few front-end projects in my time (mid 30s). I'm not claiming to be the best, but I'm good enough that I mentor engineers that are senior and costing >$250,000, and I did not gain these skills simply from being a generalist. What I simply cannot do is keep up with 10s of engineers changing a code base when I spend a lot of the day in meetings. My choice is to be the bottleneck the project and cause discontent, or let the team roll with it and pick up the pieces that fall through the cracks. Does this means that I could never again be an IC which specialises in any part at a reasonable enough level? I doubt it. But pragmatically, there are few people who see the bigger picture who have enough technical chops to get disparate specialists working together, so rather than be the 10x engineer, I try to focus on amplification and making my team a 10x team.