Your livelihood depends on those with people skills. If products don't get marketed, you don't eat. If products don't get sold, you don't eat. If your leader doesn't make the hard and right decisions on where to take the company, you don't eat.
And if the product is bad neither do they. At the end of the day it's all a group effort. Good engineers are not easily replaceable in my experience.
There's a clear delimitation between the leader which takes decisions that impact the organisation and a project manager that barely has any skin in the game. In my experience, the one that takes decisions is not the one that manages people.