It's not fundamentally different, and all engineers should be scaling their impact. Staff engineers who think like this tend to be the most useless engineers, since they eschew real work in favor of appearing politically powerful with lots of cross-team impact. Scaling impact is good, but real work often requires being deep in the trenches.
The engineering ladder is one of the worst things to happen to this industry. Sometimes cross-team is the easy stuff, and solving some deep technical issue has the most impact.
People here hate leetcode and IQ tests but they are far better filters than "job level" where I've seen many principal engineers failing to write basic code.
I'm a staff engineer. My work is quite different from what I did as a senior. I spend much more time investigating/solving organizational problems, attempting to make knowledge available cross-teams, extracting requirements from existing projects, proposing new projects, etc.
When I'm not doing that, I'm working on deep technical issues, but I already did that as a senior/tech lead.
It's about scaling yourself through others, and not everyone wants to do that, and that's OK.