Context is king
I suspect that I am very late to this party, but I recently heard the term that software engineering is just programming over time. I decided that it fits. Most of the difficulty in the work isn't that any one thing is all that difficult to build on its own. But rarely is the work truly greenfield. Plenty of people can code in a vacuum, but it is less common to find an engineer who will consider the environment onto which they are grafting changes before they start the demolition. I have found, as one of what I would call the slow squirrel developers (to distinguish from the fast rockstar devs), much of what makes my contributions valuable to my colleagues and employer is my vast collection of the ever-elusive ✨ context ✨ .
It's not mission-critical, the context I hold -- write that stuff down, for your future self if no one else -- but reflecting on spending five years on the same tech rocket ship, I have seen things. I also have a very broad shallow memory with poor garbage collection, so while I earnestly do not recall the day of the week, I can truffle-pig a Slack thread detailing why we can't remove that feature flag and what is blocking the refactor of that page you hate to look at. I can read a benign-looking PR and ask, "Did you check with the team that is working on XYZ adjacent feature -- this looks like it might not conform to the logic they are implementing". I can hunt down obscure bugs because I have this strange little spiderweb of ✨ context ✨.
I suspect this comes from having a background stronger in Design than Computer Science. Sure I know algorithms and memory allocation, but as a Product Engineer, the larger part of my work is to tease out new technical features without cannibalizing the UX. Design helps a lot when you need to think about how something is used, how it is written, and how it ought to be maintained over time given those two things. You benefit greatly by understanding the ✨ context ✨ surrounding the task at hand. Though, in order for work items to fit, other things must go.
So, if I missed your birthday, blame the ongoing psuedo-backlog of reasons to explain to my EM why that feature looks like a 2 to our PM but is really an 8 at best. Context is king. Appreciate the squirrels in your projects. They may just have a little acorn that saves you the headache of a last-minute unknown unknown.