I bet you would hate to spend 4+ hours per day in negotiation meetings, stacking up plans and writing reports, some days not even having time to start working on development tasks. You'd probably give all this to someone who wants and has experience to do it, someone like...a manager?

If your lead dev didn't have to spend that much then I'm afraid that experience does not extrapolate on what larger companies do; if they did then I think you're missing the elephant in the room that the lead dev was de-facto the manager at the expense of their direct duties.