I had a team like that once. It was glorious. And ultimately, I'm convinced it led to overall faster development cycles because the baseline code quality & documentation was so much better than it would have been without such a great QA manager. The QA team, of course, was also technical -- mostly with SWE backgrounds -- and they were primarily colo'd in the same office as the dev team. I still remember the epiphany everyone had one planning cycle when it was mutually understood that by generally agreeing to use TDD, the QA team could participate actively in the real engineering planning and product development process.

... Then I left and my CIO let go the onshore QA team in favor of near term cost savings. Code quality went way down and within a year or two several apps needed to be entirely rewritten. Everything slowed down and people started pointing fingers, and before you knew it, it was time for "cloud native rearchitecting/reengineering" which required an SI to come in with "specialists".