You can (should) also give leadership to juniors on appropriately sized projects. That's how you make better programmers.
You don't give leadership - you assign ownership, and hope leadership evolves from those responsibilities. Leadership is nurtured by helping the junior navigate issues, holding a vision for them long enough until they can realize it on their own.
There's a reason good leadership is so rare and appreciated, and it's not because it grows on trees.
Famous "Do you love your wife?"question and more.
Have that ingrained in my mind since reading Abrash forever ago.
In all seriousness I have noticed that "business value tunnel vision" is one of the surest ways to run a company into the ground in many if not most fields and Wall Street keeps pushing it anyway to nobody's benefit. The fundamentals of the field are what you have to care about or else you will have a really bad time.
Many businesses are poorly invested and put themselves at a disadvantage.