Once I realized that, it made a lot more sense why I wasn't (and shouldn't!) be the one calling the shots on priority, UX, tempo. Even for things like tech debt, it really needs to be baked into the ability to deliver new value to a customer or it's very often not worth addressing.
Ultimately, I tried to get closer and closer to the users, so I could be in a position to know what they want, but as I did that, I found myself coding less and less.
It's a tradeoff. If you really love to code, you must accept you need help figuring out what to code. If you would rather build things people like, you must accept that means spending a lot of your time talking to and working with users.
You can't be a one man band.
I personally think this is the future, and the myth of the introverted software developer who comes up for air to say 5 words in a standup is well past its expiration date, but a lot of people cling to that pretty strongly, so I expect people will prefer to code in dysfunctional teams that aren't well connected to their users for years to come.
Corporate almost always wants faster/better/more agile/higher reuse and you see that in postings/interviews but the PMs/Principle types always dig a moat to prevent anything from moving down to Seniors and lower.
If you're chafing there due to the lack of autonomy, I promise there are places hiring people whose strong suit is tackling ambiguity in addition to software development.
No deadlines, nearly no meetings, and definitely no pre-chewed tickets. Write your own spec and then ship it (all with help from team mates ofc).
I'm pretty confident that we're not the only company that works like this.
What I think I mean is, if you're appalled by employers that treat people like replaceable cogs, then it might be worth your while to find an employer that doesn't :-)
I used to work in embedded software too. At the risk of sounding arrogant, it is my experience that embedded devs learn the web stack a lot faster & more thoroughly than vice versa. So should you at any point be interested in switching to web/mobile tech then be sure to get in touch.
And, totally unrelated, when I did embedded software, by far the coolest job I had was at a hardware startup. We were 9 people in a room making a lithography machine (a machine that makes chips) that could compete with the market leader's 20 year old junk. Said old junk was getting, well, old and broken, so we were trying to fill that demand gap.
I think at least half the team was working well outside their usual skillset at any point in time. It was super frustrating for people who considered themselves specialists and awesome for the rest. I learned a lot there about what a workplace where generalists thrive looks like.