ever work for a manager that barely understood what you do, or how it’s done? Been there, done that. Never again…

Engineers shouldn’t be _forced_ into management but the option should be encouraged if they have the aptitude for it.

You're also making a bad assumption. I'm just saying there should be multiple paths forward. You can promote in any direction you want as long as you decide that your employees can do that. In our fictitious scenario some could go to manage teams some not. Some could focus on their work being a team lead, some just continue doing their thing.

My point is literally at the arbitrariness of promotion and how biased it is. There's a very clear bias that being structured by business people who think business people are the most important. The classic "I do x, so x is more important" fallacy.

My point is to make people just question if what we do is actually reasonable, and if we could do things better.

Besides, I've worked with people who previously knew how to program but lost the skill when moving to management for a decade and they aren't really any better than the manager that never knew it. Neither of these results in smooth operation. But I think to see a solution we'd also need to reconsider the premise. That's what I'm getting at.