I think many readers here have had a pretty negative experience with a new manager parachuting in (usually as a referral from other senior leadership), immediately deciding that the team is underperforming without knowing much about the business context, technical constraints, and company culture that led to the current environment, and making big structural changes without consulting the boots-on-the-ground folks. Usually we hear stories from the engineers who are disaffected. This feels like an anecdote from the other side.
It's not wrong to wonder about your career trajectory, but it's telling to see someone pretty nakedly talk about optimizing for changing their level at a company, before they've even landed there and evaluated if they can help / how they are helping their team. I'm not naive, and I recognize those people exist and can acknowledge that they can do good work. But if someone came into my workplace with the mindset of "aggressively [seeking] to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks" and their goal was going "from Senior Manager to Director in ... 12 months", I'd be skeptical that they weren't going to damage peer relationships and optimize for being recognized at the expense of their direct reports, even if I thought they could be a valuable asset in the short term.
Thanks for writing this. I have similar gripes about FastAPI having developed an application over the past few years; I'm also continually surprised at how prevalent the attitude is that FastAPI has excellent docs, given how divorced the tutorial / toy examples in the docs are from real-world development and measurement of an API.
Commenting because I went through this maddening and incomprehensible process last year and got rejected a bunch as well. The thing that I believe worked for me was that I completed domain verification via my business manager account (which was also a journey in and of itself). Once that came through, my Tech Provider application was approved within the next day or two.