> In retrospect, higher ups did mention in passing about an year ago about how I need to speak up in meetings etc.
That's a critical point. If you have 15 years experience, even if you don't have a "leadership" title, you are expected to demonstrate some leadership in meetings.
First: In the meeting, you should be able to discuss tradeoffs, explain why certain things are easier, safer, or more dangerous. You should be able to give context and have an opinion. Your opinions need to be fair and unbiased, or you should be able to point out that you're biased towards a particular approach. You're in the meeting for your experience, both career experience, and (if you've been in the job for awhile,) experience with the product(s).
Second, and this is more critical, but harder to do: You need to be able to stop bad meetings. In some cases, this is a matter of just telling someone that their 20 person invite list is too long. In other cases, you need to interrupt people and force them to make their point or move on; or you need to interrupt a meeting to politely excuse half of the people in the room who don't need to be there.
Yes, it's technically management's job to stop bad meetings, but it's also your job too. Stopping bad meetings is everybody's job, but it falls on the most experienced people on a team to lead by setting an example.