You vividly captured my every day life as a Senior SWE. It takes much effort to keep a steady balance between actively coding and also managing projects and engineers.

In this position, you tend to stay ahead of the team, figuring things out, identifying edge cases and design flaws, sitting in stakeholder meetings, building POCs etc. Literally, clearing the shrubs ahead of the team to streamline their work as much is possible.

Acknowledged, such position most days is overwhelming but as you pointed out, it's also insightful and challenging in an interestingly positive way.