As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do.
I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.
you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value.
If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt.
Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time".
I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed.
So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.