First, I don't get why diversity is given passing mention when there's nothing related specific to diversity or gender politics in the solid idea discussed by the article.

I also tend to value this sort of work and I aspire to be this sort of person, but it's easy to see how a company would end up incentivizing their engineers to create more stuff.

Creating stuff gives glue types their chance to optimize the small stuff.

Meanwhile, it's genuinely harder to find someone who can rise to the occasion of high technical output after doing a good glue job, than it is someone who does great technical work and can also be this sort of glue person.

Someone who does a lot of high impact technical work can identify bottlenecks and could very well do the same work as the glue person. The opposite isn't always true.

It's also much harder to figure out if someone is just very nice and doing work that would be picked up by someone else in their absence or if they are indeed identifying pain points no one else could.