[tyleo]

I concur with the comments that soft skills are necessary to excel even as an individual contributor. An anecdote comes to mind:

A student publishing their first paper was remiss that their name was only one among many. Their mentor said, “That only matters if this is the only paper you ever write. Publish a lot of papers, and you won’t care for the placement of your name among any single one.”

The point is to do a lot of teamwork. You can scale yourself and others that way. I like to think that the job of an IC is more “make software happen” than “write all the software on your own”.