That's a rather junior mentality. When one is junior, yeah, usually the most one can do is moving Jira tickets to Done (which means merging code usually). But when one is senior, the pay increases and promotions come from other activities: mentoring, handling technical topics between teams (usually via meetings), etc.
Not universally. Programmers are judged by overall success or failure of the project they are working on. And those ones who can take credit for a success or who can effectively deflect blame for failure are the ones who got promoted. Being in the meetings with the decision makers provides the forum for self-promotion and controlling the message. This does not always mean that they did most of the work. More code or less code is unfortunately secondary.