When I think of highly functioning staff engineers Im thinking of people like Jeff Dean and Mitchell Hashimoto. Similarly at companies I have been at, even the highest level principal super staff++ engineers still code. They do the high level strategy and design, but they are still writing PRs at least every week or two. If you are spending 100% of your time on politics and architecture as a staff eng I think that shows a somewhat dysfunctional organization.
Maybe in a business where the cost of iteration is very high, it makes sense to do this. But in a good business you should not be doing architecture reviews and writing proposals, you should be doing refactoring and creating prototypes, respectively.
Solving business problems using bespoke software solutions surely is the absolute most expensive option on the table, and should be aggressively avoided unless no other options are available, AND the problem is in a domain which is a core competency and market differentiator for your business.
The process of figuring out what your company needs, and how best to solve that problem long term, is dramatically more valuable to a business than software/technology implementation.
Architecture reviews ensure that there is some strategy on how things are being solved at an organisational level.