The idea that they should pretend to be an ordinary engineer is strange to me.
Personal itches? The idea was, their solution was objectively better. Not a personal itch. Defensible as better for the product. Just trickier to explain or support.
You reprimand a senior engineer, you'll have no senior engineers. Just a job shop with a pile of undesigned code, boilerplate from the example book that is even more fragile, unscalable, a hundred other problems that have technical debt of their own.
Code is a sophisticated topic. To blame folks who get that and can work with it, is misplaced criticism.
A solution is objectively better only if it moves the codebase forward towards the business objectives. More often that not this involves no refactoring but surgically adding features without changing or breaking any existing functionality.
At some point a Senior Engineer is about Engineering. Leave the marketing to that department.
The idea that 'business objectives' can be meaningful in detail at the Engineering level is hopeful. Maybe in a startup with one product, and even then, everybody is guessing about what features will resonate and what the customer base is.
No, a Senior Engineer is first about competent correct performant code. That's got to be their focus. Not attending business meetings.
The engineers you are describing are some of the biggest time wasters I have seen - spending months on making “engineering improvements”. One guy I met spent a year on making the perfect build system in rust lang that I could have written in cmake and bash in a week.
This has reduced to cherry-picking bad examples. I think we both understand the issues by now.