I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.

We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.

For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".

Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.