The problem is that as you go further up in hierarchy, people by definition have less specialized, and more general knowledge. This means that there are things that lower-level employee understands but their manager doesn't. This in turn means that it's impossible for the manager to tell whether the employee is doing a good or a bad job because the manager simply doesn't understand the details of the job. This is open door for slackers and low-performers, because from certain perspectives, they're indistinguishable from hard workers.
I used to be a hard-working high-performer, but then I understood that because of numerous management problems that are beyond my control, the reward is very loosely correlated with my efforts, and given an existing job contract, the best way to maximize the reward/effort ratio is not to put more effort hoping for disproportionately higher rewards, but to put significantly less effort because the reward will drop just slightly. Do you want to up your hourly salary 5 times? Simply take 5 times as much time to deliver same feature. You might not get the 0.05x salary bump but that doesn't actually impact the calculation that much.
An intelligent manager with generalized expertise can be smart enough to figure out intuitively the performance of their directs in a specialized area they have less knowledge in. In fact I would argue it's a must for a tech manager, and it shows in the form of a mix of Socratic questioning, knowing when to step in and get out of the way, and stopping to deep dive if necessary without micromanaging. For a good manager, I think micromanaging is a punishment or a temporary condition.
A bad tech manager a) thinks he/she must know more than their directs (no organization would ever scale if the leader in the hierarchy above knew all of what was below), b) micromanages competent people instead of giving them high level directives and course correcting at a high level when necessary c) can't tell the difference between the high performers and the slackers.
In my experience, there's a slew of bad managers out there, and in my present reality the bad ones are highly technical people who should not be managing human beings or projects.
If I get kicked out from big tech I might search for such a place, but for the time being, I am in a position where I get paid to do nothing, it's literally free money. My plan A is to keep doing same nothing until retirement (about 15 years). Plan B is not to have plan B and just look at the job market when I need to switch, because it's utterly unpredictable long-term.
I used to be a hard-working high-performer, but then I understood that because of numerous management problems that are beyond my control, the reward is very loosely correlated with my efforts, and given an existing job contract, the best way to maximize the reward/effort ratio is not to put more effort hoping for disproportionately higher rewards, but to put significantly less effort because the reward will drop just slightly. Do you want to up your hourly salary 5 times? Simply take 5 times as much time to deliver same feature. You might not get the 0.05x salary bump but that doesn't actually impact the calculation that much.