Haha I am as technical as it gets (Have a masters degree in engineering from a decent school, even have written my own compiler and database system) and this is the senior engineer I want to be and have in my team.

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.