It's certainly how they market themselves. Look how great we are, we're leaders, we're mentors, we're leaders, we think bigger, we make a bigger impact, blah blah blah.
And it's a crock of shit. It's not up to an IC to decide strategy, make executive decisions, or lead a team, unless Lead or Manager is in their title. Thinking big, prioritizing, choosing what to work on, etc, is something every engineer should learn to do, as part of a team. And that team should be led or driven by an individual whose job it is to, hierarchically, be in charge/responsible, and all that entails.
At the highest possible level, a staff engineer can be the "idea person" who looks at everything and can make proposals or lay some groundwork. But the "glue" of connecting a team to the rest of the organization needs to come from management and leadership, because they're the ones who can reach out to everyone without overstepping, and take the flack when it comes.
Here's another example: https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes/ This dude is claiming that these four separate roles and skillsets are just types of Staff Engineer. This is such ridiculous bullshit I don't think this person has actually done time in large engineering orgs. The tech lead doesn't even have to be very good, they just need to herd cats and be a tie breaker. The architect is an architect, a speciality distinct from the rest of software/systems engineering that doesn't even require coding. A "solver" is known in other circles as a "fixer", which is another word for someone who doesn't take shit and gets a job done, which doesn't require much other than willpower and attention. And a "right hand" literally is just shitty organization/management taking advantage of someone who gets things done yet has no political power.
In any case, all these resources talking about Staff Engineering are bullshit hype-cycle for a very simple reason: if you're a Staff Engineer, you know all this shit already. If you're not one, reading these books won't make you one. It's like thinking you can become a great woodworker by reading a book on woodworking. It's all just career voyeurism, or aspiration porn, written up to sound authoritative, but is actually completely made up, because it's actually just normal work that somebody wanted to sound more important.
I certainly agree that reading these books won't make you have the skills needed to be a Staff engineer but I think the rest of your point seems highly biased by your individual personal experience.
Btw, Will Larson was at Etsy in a very senior role for a while, so he definitely knows how engineering orgs work.
The reason I see for these books existing is because engineering orgs have evolved and grown to a scale where a new role came up: of an individual contributor that exercises cross team influence. This only makes sense in massive (1k+ engineers), highly organisationally flexible companies. It doesn't make sense in small ones and it doesn't make sense in inflexible ones. Those sorts of companies have not existed for too long.
BTW Will Larson's book is a synthesis based on the collection of anecdotes from people actually employed with such titles across companies, so you can read it and see if those things make sense.
