Yes sometimes you need to be able to simplify things for non-technical shareholders, but no that's not what this should be.
In an engineering focused organization if recruiters are reaching out for a position this high up they should either be solely acting as a data gatherer while a highly technical person reviews, or they should be technical enough themselves.
We're not talking about screening internships here, the person in the article didn't ask Google for an interview, it was on Google to provide competent points of contact. That doesn't necessarily scale if we're talking about applications they receive, but that's why the article states almost immediately it was an unsolicited interview.
There's no level above which this stops being important. If anything, it only increases as you go up.
There are probably thousands of 'director of engineering' or similar roles at Google. If it's anything like other companies, they will be managing something like ~50 people. It's a middle management role, not that high up - except in compensation relative to the median...
How high up is this? What's a director in FANG-land? In some places, a manager of managers is a director - which isn't very high, and can be closer to the ICs than to the CEO on the org chart.
But there are orders of magnitude fewer people are hired yearly into director positions than something like an L5.
So the expectation is past a point you're not going to reach out to someone and waste their time like this.
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Also a manager of managers is plenty high, some places are just so bloated it doesn't seem that way.
You'd think someone you're trusting to have that level of influence is worth the extra effort