I think “going full generalist” is perhaps not a generalizable solution, though directionally it’s good advice if you have more than two dev roles (or maybe two plus Q) in a 10-person team.

No mention of task composition, but I wonder if framing stories in terms of user needs was another missing piece. It sounds like you were giving updates on low-level eng tasks not user stories.

When I ran a team of this size, sure the implementation details of a technical task wouldn’t make sense, but generally we had a frontend and backend engineer buddy up to own a user story, and reporting to the team was mostly at the level of “we are shipping feature X for customers Y,Z - API work turned out to be gnarly, let’s break out and have a backend guild design session asap”.

If you have QA then the “three amigos” approach is nice, product owner, dev owner, and tester all sit down and craft a story that is mutually comprehensible. If you achieve this then you can feel confident that others on your team will also understand the framing of the story. Takes discipline though!