Comment by bagacrap

Actually I have seen successful promotion packets based on elimination of complexity. When maintenance of a complex system becomes such a burden that even a director is aware of it, "eliminating toil" is a staff level skill.

More than once I have seen the same project yield two separate promotions, for creating it and deleting it. In particular this happens when the timescale of projects is longer than a single engineer's tenure on a given team.

But yes, avoiding complexity is rarely rewarded. The only way in which it helps you get promoted is that each simple thing takes less time and breaks less often, so you actually get more done.