It certainly can apply to ICs too. The scope and complexity of projects increases with seniority until they fall beyond the innate capacity of your brain.

As an extreme example, suppose the spectrum of software IC spans writing simple CRUD apps as a Junior Engineer to singlehandedly writing qemu and ffmpeg as an 10x Rockstar Ninja Principal Engineer. At some point most people (who aren’t Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack) will be promoted into a role where they simply can’t keep up intellectually.