I think many readers here have had a pretty negative experience with a new manager parachuting in (usually as a referral from other senior leadership), immediately deciding that the team is underperforming without knowing much about the business context, technical constraints, and company culture that led to the current environment, and making big structural changes without consulting the boots-on-the-ground folks. Usually we hear stories from the engineers who are disaffected. This feels like an anecdote from the other side.

It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.