The challenge is that a lot of companies don't place engineers into the "critical skills" category, which leads to the [perceived by business & IT leadership] natural method of increasing an excellent engineer's sphere of influence being to promote them into management. Sometimes this works wonderfully, but it's obvious how spectacularly it can fail, too. If a company doesn't have engineering as a core competency, they're far more likely to fall into this trap than a company that does.

I'm speaking from experience here, having spent 15 years working for a company where promoting "technical managers" was a source of pride ... and 90% of the time the fallout of such promotions was that engineering quality degraded.