If you came up through brand or communications before digital became the engine of everything, I want to say something to you directly rather than around you.
The discomfort you feel in rooms full of attribution models and incrementality tests and data infrastructure discussions is not a skill gap. It is a context gap. You built something real in your career. You understand customers, narrative, trust, and the long architecture of brand equity in a way that a performance marketer who has only ever worked in channels does not. That is not a deficit. It is a capability the business needs more than it knows.
What changed is not the importance of what you know. It is the language the room uses to make decisions. And the businesses that are losing the tension between brand and performance, that have collapsed everything into a ROAS dashboard and wonder why customers are not returning, are paying the price of forgetting what you have spent twenty years learning.
Your instinct that something is wrong with the way the commercial system is measuring itself is probably right. It just needs a framework to land in.
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