"Producing Artifacts" is definitely what we called that at Fog Creek, and I think our cousins at Stack may have used a different term but followed much the same spirit. I didn't realize until now that that was a term from our little software microcosm, I had assumed it was one of the terms that was known broadly in the startupverse.
I definitely came to my opinions around it through my interactions with the Business of Software conference and (later) Microconf, and I think in parallel Stack Overflow came to much the same conclusions as we did at FC. Stack also lead with something in its early days which pushed us to go further, which was that they had a "default open" policy on all their artifacts-- code, company writing, etc. This specifically was inspiring for us at FC and many of us sort of implicitly adopted it. We doubled-down on our artifact publishing, leading to a bunch of open source contributions, blog posts, conference talks, etc. Interestingly (and to your point!) I think that those public artifacts for the most part didn't impact the company very much (as much as we did try to harvest the artifacts for blogging/marketing/recruiting purposes), but they unquestionably strengthened the careers of the folks who created them.
"Make sure your work is creating artifacts; Collect and share your artifacts to multiply their impact." Remains among my top items of career advice for software folks.