Many go into management, as you say. In my experience the best managers were never even remotely the best designers in terms of pure raw talent. That is sorta secondary to your question, and just kinda my own personal inject. At the same time though, I think it supports the idea that staff/principal/"Distinguished whatever" titles for design serve a use case. In fact, some BigCos have adopted that model similar to St…
What exactly is / has been burning you out? PS your profile needs an email address if you want folks to reach out ;)
Truly, I think I just find the design work mundane at this point - maybe just by virtue of doing it for so many years. I do a lot of coding work (throwaway UI component prototypes, that kind of thing) and am finding more joy there.
But part of it too is that I work at a big financial corp who are a great employer, but our tools ecosystem and ability to share work with the outside world is _incredibly_ limited. Just a common trade-off of working at such a company, and I understand why that has to be. But nothing fulfilled me more than shipping things at a startup or small, nimble company. Hoping I can get back to that when our family is a little more comfortable financially.