Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.
They no longer code, but they still take part in technical discussions, so being an engineer is absolutely a part of their job.
So it is easy to evaluate companies like this. Did technical people hire business people to do those tasks for them? Or did business people hire technical people to create a product for them? The first is engineering lead, the second is the standard enterprise.
The most common reporting line I've seen (working at tech companies that you would know and recognize immediately) is director -> { sdm, pm-t } where the director is typically promoted from one of those roles. There is an insulation layer between product and engineering, and as levels progress the line between pm-t and sdm blurs significantly.