"It's over a period of years working through projects, making mistakes, writing code, sitting in meetings, solving problems, and using an often wide range of technologies."

Sitting in meetings? Tell me this was put in as a joke. The best I've ever gotten out of any meeting is staying awake until it's over.

Recurring meetings are almost always complete wastes of time; having a meeting because it's a certain time on a certain day and for no other reason. Nothing to talk aout? Tough. We're stiill going the full two hours.

One more feature of a GD I would add: he knows most or all of the project at some level of detail, not on;y the area he works on.

I read every commit in GitKraken, and stay atop the whole project.