Usually parents can't sleep well only for a year at most, even 6 months old children are sleeping whole nights.
Pre-6 months, we’re talking about a zombie lifestyle where there is no “sleeping at night,” just sleeping between feedings.
I acknowledge there are definitely both cultural and hereditary elements to this, but your comment is so starkly different from my experience and the experience of my friends.
But it turns out toddlers will get up in the night and ask you to tuck them back in, they will get up because they had a scary dream, because they can't find their stuffed animal, and don't get me started on night terrors.
The point is I don't think this tracks.
I don't think I've had a solid week of uninterrupted sleep since our first came home.
My experience/understanding: Very bright kids get night terrors when you make sure they are physically tired enough to sleep but fail to make sure they are mentally tired enough to sleep. You need both to sleep deeply and bright kids who can't yet read have trouble reaching a state of being adequately mentally tired.
I suggest you join some parenting lists for people suffering from having made the mistake if giving birth to bright kids. Tagfam.org is probably still a good place to begin trying to find support resources and reliable info.
Edit: Bright kids are known to be prone to a variety of sleep issues. I spent twelve years arranging every minute of every day to make sleep feasible for one of my kids.
YMMV but kids have their hangups and it's often not possible to negotiate rationally. They also regress (this past year has been terrible, with no school for extended periods, staying at grandma's every couple of weeks so parents can get work done...), and you're back to square one.
Ours are 2 and 5, and I haven't slept in on a Saturday morning since 2015.
If you want to have both parents working, stay late at the office, have both parents involved with kids for every activity, and also work on side projects late at night, you're going to struggle until the kids are more self sufficient.
Even without kids, waking up at 6AM, hustling through morning routines and to the office, working to 6PM and then getting home at 6:30PM (assuming commute) leaves about 3.5 hours of free time and 8 hours for sleep. If you're trying to shoe-horn involved hobbies and side projects into those weekdays, something has to give regardless of whether or not you have kids.
The standard parent learning curve usually involves: Becoming more efficient with your routines, becoming more efficient with time management at the office, learning to say no to unnecessary requests, pushing back on jobs that demand long hours (or changing jobs to a more reasonable 8-hour workday company), becoming more efficient with meals and grocery shopping, doing more tradeoff load sharing with partner instead of both people being involved in everything, and letting kids have more independent play time as they age.
That said, you simply won't have as much alone time with kids in the equation. If you're trying to do too much, you have to sacrifice somewhere. It's better to do a few things well than to try to do everything at 75% commitment or being 75% awake.