Promotion driven features are definitely not entirely a myth IMO, but on the other hand, anecdotally I saw quite a few people get promoted at Google for doing m

Promotion driven features are definitely not entirely a myth IMO, but on the other hand, anecdotally I saw quite a few people get promoted at Google for doing make-things-work-better work. The trick was figuring out which were the important things to maintain and make small improvements to, rather than just which were the things that seemed fun to tinker with, but weren't as impactful.