Developers do want managers actually, to simplify their daily lives. Otherwise they would self manage themselves better and keep more of the share of revenues for them

Unfortunately some managers get lonely and want a friendly face in their org meetings, or can’t answer any technical questions, or aren’t actually tracking what their team is doing. And so they pull in an engineer from their team.

Being a manager is a hard job but the failure mode usually means an engineer is now doing something extra.