[nitrogen]

Is your assumption that ppl that aren't principals don't consider pitfalls.

No such assumption on my part. But it might be safe to assume that the better you are at questioning assumptions, avoiding pitfalls, and thinking of the big picture (think breadth-first vs depth-first traversal of the problem space), the more likely you are to advance to higher levels of responsibility.

Another example. Suppose you are adding a new field to your payment processing system. You have considered engineering pitfalls. How will that change affect other teams? What about other departments? Will Accounts Receivable suddenly have a 10x workload of invoices to chase because that field change wasn't considered in their workflow in all cases?

There's nothing magical about what senior vs staff vs principal vs whatever engineers do, it's the same skills amplified and applied to the benefit of many people across an org, rather than limited in scope and awareness to a single project.