Based on my own experience as someone taking the journey from junior developer to CTO of a mid sized company: No, you can't keep that mental model for long.

At first I would write code, which involves a ton of reading and _truly_ understanding code written by others.

Then I would increasingly spend my (technical) time on code reviews. At some point I lost a lot of my intuition about the system, and proper reviews took a long time, I ended up delegating all of that.

Finally, I would mainly talk to middle managers and join high level conversations. I'd still have a high level idea about how everything worked, but kinda lost my ability to challenge what our technical people told me. I made sure to carve out some time to try and stay on top, but I got really rusty.

This was over a time frame of perhaps two or three years. Since then, I've made changes, working at lower levels. I think I got my mojo back, but it took another one or two years of spending ~50% of my day programming.

Other people will be different, but that's how it was for me. To truly understand and memorise something, I need to struggle with it personally. And truly understanding things helps with a lot of higher level work.

But as with anything that takes a few years to materialise, you usually notice it quite a while after the damage is done. Long feedback cycles (like for business decisions, investments into code quality etc) are the root of all evil, IMHO.