Bosses love to think that they know it all, but they operate on limited info like everybody else. This just shows how stupid it is to work hard for a job, when everything is based on impressions and not on any kind of objective measures.
I work hard for myself at work. To know my day and time wasn't wasted. I also try to learn something new every day. If I'm gonna be a wage slave I'm gonna be a smart wage slave.
One time I spent an hour restacking four small pallets into one big pallet. Managera come through and one of them says, "hey wow, looks much cleaner in here, good work today!"
It's a running joke where I work just how hard it is to get fired. One of the few stories I know of someone who was fired involved an employee for whom my employer paid multiple times for courses of rehab. He was finally fired when after all that they found him at his desk so drunk they basically couldn't wake him at all.
On my first job, there were several employees whose jobs was to aimlessly wander around the office because they had a problem with their logins when they were hired and nobody bothered to fix it for them. Companies really don't give a shit.
The secret to promotion is to be competent but not amazing.
If you're good enough not to be fired, but not so good you're indispensable in your current role, your boss will be happy to recommend you for promotion to get you out of their umbrella.
But honestly, I could see this in pretty much any office setting, including mine. My boss will go whole days stuck in meetings, so I'll only see them if I get in really early or stay late. If I'm missing all day, people would assume I'm also in meetings or something, because we work with remote teams and half of my team is remote.
I'm a software engineer, but this could work for almost any office job, especially those in cubicles.