I think you'r point is that people with 10 or fewer years of experience (which I think is many people in this thread based on the comments) might have a sample bias issue that stems from working around fewer total managers and fewer companies, where those companies also may be worse than average at selecting managers? I would agree that there are probably plenty of people who fit that mold given the state of our industry recently.

As for "draining resources" to do whatever reporting they need to do I don't think I understand what is fragile about it or why it would be anything other than necessary. It's like log aggregation/introspection, you do it because you want to see what's going on at a lower level without dealing with the minutia of every point of data.

To this end as engineers we design code that fills management roles all the time in our systems, and we understand perfectly why their role is needed but sometimes fail to realize that human systems are analogous. Nobody is arguing why a load balancer can be an important part of a system, or the values provided by ORMs, but here we are arguing about what managers do in a complex human system.