Last large company I worked for had something along the lines of "improving state of the art at the company" as a performance metric for principal / staff engineers. Basically, if you weren't doing something novel or carving out some personal impact on the development process, tooling, or product itself, they always had something they could hold against you if they wanted.
The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".
The net result was, predictably, staff engineers went out of their way to leave feedback on PRs (typically worthless, often self-contradictory within short time spans) to keep their name visible, and any pain point raised and effort to resolve it by senior level developers was shot down because some staff engineer "was working on it".