Really hard to get promoted, its probably easier to quit, return a year later and apply to the next level and get hired. Sometimes the priority is to show off your work than doing it, so a document that explains how to do something better (even if it's wrong) might be better for your career than make the thing better without much documentation.
For promotions, you're overly dependent on how your manager sells you, there's no way you can overcome a bad manager aside from changing teams. The issue is that most tech managers are mid. Usually the ones that were engineers and did the work (and they were good engineers) and became managers because they didn't like their managers are the good ones.
