I thought that was the whole point of the IC track: putting a technical person into a role where they can be a multiplier without burdening them with management responsibilities.

Every staff/principle/architect IC I've ever worked with has had that kind of positive effect on the teams around them. Their schedules were indistinguishable from most managers, except they met mostly one on one and they could get a senior engineer's worth of work (impact wise) done in between the meetings instead of paying the management overhead.