Proof of exertion (work) and proof of impact.
An engineer making many commits is just proof of exertion. An engineer closing many tickets is proof of impact.
A manager can also do a lot of exertion with no impact - has 1:1s and listens and forgets its all within a year, talks to everybody like they have a shot at promotion even when he knows he has a fixed budget, makes 0 tough decisions around the product and obeys everything their manager says no matter how terrible.
But if you ARE making big swings at work (e.g. preventing whole bad projects from happening, or driving entirely new projects that were your own idea, contradicting your manager and being right, recruiting great connections, etc) then you should be able to find a record of your relevance [and if you can't then that's mentality thing].