In general is there any practical way to fix the issue of "Every rewrite was someone's promotion project"? There doesn't seem to be any incentive for employees to care about projects long term. Keeping something running smoothly is never rewarded the same as launching something new or fixing something broken.

100% change the way American Tech companies treat their workforce?

Most people don't get meaningful raises at existing jobs so if they want raises, they must job hop or internally job switch.

Companies will layoff at drop of the hat so you have to make sure your skillset is up to date so you can get next job.

So everyone is launching big splashy projects so they put on their resume to protect themselves in case of layoffs or turn into a promotion.

Not really: it’s a lazy pejorative, in this case written by an LLM, not a description of reality. It’s honestly one of the stupider ideas that has caché, it seems to only survive by repetition.

Here, the tell is you’re not gonna get a multibillion dollar company on hockey stick growth to switch storage because you want to get promoted.