What you like is for yourself. What you seem to dislike are things that improve others (team/stakeholders). Seniors are such because they take on more of the latter.

This will now become even more normalized given that on technical skills seniors are no longer needed for juniors to skill up. AI and the evolving ecosystem will help and assist them way more. In the new world, the more technical and non-technical work you do towards customers/teams/organization, the more senior you become. I see many not liking it, but I'm also seeing first hand that is how it is.

> If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time to hack on things and show them cool stuff, it would be wonderful.

I think that's a lot of it! (Author here, btw) I think that doing more of that actually makes performance discussions easier and takes the place of 1:1s a lot of times. The whole point of performance management is to nurture the relationship with the junior so that they grow into the type of senior that they need to be to be a contributing member of the team. And if you can achieve that better through hacking and pairing, then by all means.

As far as all the other BS meetings, I think that a lot of people in leadership positions aren't intentional/strategic enough about which meetings they allow themselves to get "hauled into", so they end up totally jaded and burnt out. They think they can't say no to these things, and so they lose the reins on their actual goals. If you step back and ask yourself what stakeholders actually need from you to feel heard, seen, validated, informed, etc, then it may look different from a calendar full of meetings.

Many companies have different career tracks for managers than for individual contributors (even tech leads are considered ICs). Mentoring junior engineers is absolutely in scope for what senior ICs can be recognized for.