> People get promoted for all the shiny new things they do, not for the discipline they show in only focusing on what really matters.

Depends on the company and its values. I've been in companies where engineers who don't care about the business/customers were promoted by other engineers who don't care about the business/customers, and yeah, promotions were getting handed out for engineers who did a hacky prototype integration with the latest & greatest NoSQL Big Data GraphQL Blockchain OSS project while solving no actual problems. I've also been other places (Amazon) where customers really are front and center, and spending time on cool engineering projects that serve no customer purpose meant absolutely nothing when you wrote up your promotion doc.