I don't know that I agree that a "managing engineer" is the same as a manager of engineers.

Managers justifiably get a lot of flak, because management is fairly intangible, our society has decided to conflate authority and prestige with direction-setting, and there are just a huge number of incompetent managers.

But anyone that's tried a multi-person project without management understands the value of management. Someone has to step up and manage, and if it's your best engineer, you're spending a pretty valuable resource (their time) on something someone else might be able to do better.

Finding good managers is super hard, but a good manager can still be valuable, even though bad managers are frustratingly useless.