Senior or not, in many mid-size companies and above, developers are only seen as Individual contributors, with little influence and zero authority. I'm not say

Senior or not, in many mid-size companies and above, developers are only seen as Individual contributors, with little influence and zero authority. I'm not saying what you claim is impossible, it totally is possible. Working your way up does not only involve hard skills or soft skills, but also the local context must somehow enable/allow this and that certainly involves a lot of internal politics. One question though: since you did that a few times, why did you not pick a C-level position (or any high level position) directly after your first success? Why did you prefer to "reset" to developer and work all the way up?