This is a strange take to me. What do you think engineering management _is_? It's fundamentally a political role. This reads to me like "it's sad that most football managers never get to kick a ball".

I'm sure there are places where that job is primarily about engineering... But that's just a place that doesn't actually need EMs! Maybe you are saying this is the ideal org, and yeah I probably agree. So I guess this is just a semantics thing.