> "it's the people managers making strategic technical decisions"
...was true in your case.
In my experience (over 2 decades now, wow I can’t believe it) the people making the broad, strategic decisions and influencing outside of their orgs all happen to also have direct reports and usually those reports are people managers too. They have titles like “director” and “VP” and “CTO”. How many of those people have you seen who are individual contributors?
