This is 70% of my job as a Sr Staff Engineer and I love it. But yes, it does take a certain temperament to enjoy it or find it satisfying. I like collaboration and pairing and helping other ICs grow their careers. And I love teaching, which this role allows me to do in abundance in all sorts of ways. Sure, I enjoy sustained technical work as much as the next engineer - but usually that work is better done by someone else who can use it to learn and grow and can own it down the road. Otherwise it becomes another piece of company knowledge that lives only in my head, and there's too much of that already.
I think there is still a bit of a perception that IC levels higher than Senior are about "Senior but with more interesting technical problems". This is largely false. In most organizations those roles are about empowering other people. You can see this if you read the stories Will Larson's new book, Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track. Done right, it can delivery a ton of business value. Yes, it may be a continuation of the IC track, but it's a qualitatively different job. I think that could be stressed more in career guidance from management or when promoting folks into these roles, so that we don't keep promoting our most effective programmers into jobs for which they're not really suited and won't enjoy.