Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience this often just becomes a popularity contest/give to whoever you eat lunch with. I can have my head down all week neck deep in code but because of this I'm not interacting with people around me as much and basically get punished for focusing on work.
Yes. You can't change people. Your actual job description is worth 20% or less of your workplace success; as long as you're doing enough to stave off disaster, you are pretty much fine. There is a simple metric for workplace success: if most people are happier while you're around (including and especially anyone above you in the chain of command), you're winning; if not, you're not. This can probably be summarized as…
The third category, of whom I’ve known several, is “capacity/competence, with an attention to the superficialities because they know how much those matter.”
That is, I haven’t found it to be an inverse relationship. I find it to be a 2x2, and if you happen to be someone with less capability and more ability to BS, then yes, you lean on your strength to obfuscate your weakness. But you can also be strong in both, or weak in both.
I also think there are a lot of jobs where deep mastery doesn’t generally exist (eg, mopping), and so those people just have no idea what deep competency discussions are like. It’s like flatland, only the third dimension is expertise and complexity.