You're Senior After 6 Years. Now What?

It is absolutely fine to make good money and limit your responsibilities.

It is also fine to work in smaller organizations and unknown companies where you enjoy the work and there would make no sense to have more labels and roles than personnel.

There's more to life than money. I'm a freelancer/independent consultant, and as such I'm never considered for anything but senior or tech lead roles and...it's fine.

I make more money than I spend (I have the same lifestyle I had when I was making 2500€s per month), but I can optimize for choosing projects and things that I care for.

That's not really doable when you aim to climb the ladder, you need to "play" the game and you don't get to set it.

I'm free from those political shenanigans.

I also know plenty of senior devs that enjoy simply being senior devs and renouncing more responsibilities.

Eventually, for the same peter principle organizations too should not necessarily aim to push everybody to grow (albeit I understand in big tech managers do have incentives into growing and promoting people).

There's many elements of freedom in forgoing this ladder climbing and everybody should set their own priorities and goals regardless of what the industry and society says. It's liberating.

But the career progression and compensation frameworks don't currently reflect that, which means there's an incentive for engineers to artificially increase complexity of their solution, introduce churn/unneeded maintenance, all to boast their own track record, get promoted and stick around, ultimately at the expense of the company who would be much better off with a functioning product and paying for one-off maintenance/alterations as needed.

There's little correlation between someone's level on some company's progression framework and their actual engineering skill beyond a certain baseline; if anything I would say it is the opposite (the more "experienced" in traditional tech career progression the more likely they will deliver an overengineered solution, as opposed to a junior delivering a PHP script that fulfills the requirement simply because they don't know any "better").

I would only trust such a level if the person was lucky to be at the right place and time and their engineering efforts actually contributed to building/extending a useful product, as opposed to made-up busywork (with after-the-fact resume justification) which is closer to art (in terms of inventing creative ways of extracting salary from a company) than engineering.

Ideally software engineering would be closer to trades like building or electricians/plumbers/etc. They get called on a job, paid their quoted amount, and are then responsible to deliver the quoted work ideally as fast as possible (for their own good, since they'd get paid the same but could enjoy the free time or go to the next job). They won't get paid to stick around so there is little incentive to make up busywork, and the work is closer to actual engineering which is to figure out a technical solution within the agreed requirements and budget.