I've noted a similar shift, but I think it's a short-sighted path.

My experience (both in and out of management, and as a very high level IC at a mix of companies) is that while the management layers generally didn't understand what was going on in the code - the decent managers tended to have a "gut check" person they trusted to go and ask technical questions, and bounce ideas around with.

This was their "expert" who they trusted to be close enough to ground truth to tell them if a thing will work, how hard it will be, if there are shortcuts, etc... Often times, it wasn't even strictly technical questions that would get answered, it will be things like "how much of this project is technically in my sphere of control, and how much do I need to go align other teams? How many teams? Which teams? Which projects? etc..."

My problem is that AI SUCKS at this job. So yes - we're getting pushed into management roles as ICs... but instead of a decent subject matter expert who still understands ground truth... you get an LLM blabbering on about seams and load-bearing joints, and clickbait style headline summaries, but completely non-nonsensical judgement calls about how to interact with the people who make up the company.

Ultimately, work is also politics - and it's not just "writing code" that matters. It's knowing what code is worth writing, and when you should write it. And an AI will happily tell you that a single change-set in a single repo is "substantially larger then expected" and put a timeline of "two weeks" on the completion (especially if anything Jira related happens to be in context... blegh), and then knock it out in 5 minutes time... While also spouting off about how easily it can add "new feature X" it just needs to get PRs in across 5 different repos, owned by different parts of the org with non-aligned managers.