My favorite version of Staff Engineer is "Person whose prospects for career advancement are limited by their seniority, who is consequentially incentivized to care about doing the right thing".
Least favorite version is the one who doesn't realize this, and makes a muddle of an already working system to demonstrate their impact.
I think we should encourage "muddling" to the extent that it actually improves systems. However, usually such engineers underrate how difficult it is to actually improve said systems while maintaining legacy feature parity.
That is, the answer is not to discourage muddling, but to have higher standards for project management.
Least favorite version is the one who doesn't realize this, and makes a muddle of an already working system to demonstrate their impact.