One skill I underestimated early in my career

Early in my career I focused almost entirely on improving coding skills.

Learning frameworks, system design concepts, performance optimization the usual things.

But after a few years I noticed something interesting.

Some engineers with similar technical ability progressed faster because they could explain their thinking very clearly in meetings.

Design discussions Architecture reviews Technical proposals

Being able to explain trade-offs and reasoning clearly seemed to matter a lot.

I realized I had spent a lot of time learning how to build systems, but not much time practicing how to explain technical decisions.

Curious for people with more experience here:

Did communication of technical decisions become more important as you progressed in your career?