> The best managers I've worked with have always made it their mission to serve technical teams by removing obstacles and making sure that the specialists have everything they need in order to create a high quality product.

I think you're underestimating the degree to which doing this requires a solid technical understanding when there are dozens of teams involved and interacting with each other. In order for an engineering manager to bring their team(s) a clear plan of what needs to be done with few blockers or obstacles in the way, often a lot of technical planning with other groups has to precede that. As always, management done right is the sort of management you don't notice -- but that doesn't mean a ton of work isn't happening behind the scenes to make things very organized and clear for individual developers. You could have ICs do that, but they wouldn't be writing much if any code, and they probably wouldn't want to anyway.