Managers control the money. They hire, they fire, the approve or disapprove promotions. That's _fundamentally_ more power than writing code. It would be nice to be able to ignore this, but things like paying for housing, paying for kids' education, etc means you can't really just put that aside.

If you want to stay in a technical track, you need to offset your natural disadvantage here. You can't _just_ be writing code, you need to make sure you're actively -- and visibly! -- adding a lot of value as a tech lead. Even if you're not formally managing people, you're going to be coaching and mentoring engineers, because being able to tie your org's goals into a technical vision is the easy part -- the hard part is turning that vision into code that will be mostly written by not-you. And that's all people skills, involving people who do not report to you. IOW, there's still a lot of "management" work if you want to stay in the technical track.

I recently did a stint in the management track but have gone back to the technical one because I get a lot out of technical work and found I need that to sustain me and give me energy. I found I can do the management part, and didn't even mind most of it, but it wasn't sustaining me -- an important consideration since, while I've been working for a while, I have a long while to work yet. But it did help clarify where I need to grow if I'm committed to staying "technical".