If you are basically saying we should throw our hands up and give up at any kind of project management, then yeah, a significant part of engineering management is not needed. You seem to be basically saying all can be solved by http://programming-motherfucker.com/ and I get it, sometimes as a sw engineer that's all I wanted to do, but the reality is that often you need coordination and project management to get results you (or the organization) wants in a timely fashion.
> Democracy works differently - people will take an interest when their votes directly influence which stupid project gets ten million this year.
Democracy is super slow for decision-making and not everyone is equally qualified or invested to have a vote. I'm not talking about even "board meetings" here. I'm talking about having a freaking doc with 10 potential projects a given team could tackle this year. Who is going to curate those 10 projects? justify why they are needed or relevant that we should spend time on them? who is going to decide who works on what? as I said, democracy and consensus-building is slow and often will just mean "the most opinionated or stronger personality wins". You need a skilled eng manager to navigate complex conversations and keep everyone aligned on why a given project was picked.
> And finally - no. aligning incentives is easy. Pay me.
I guess this sums it up. You personally may only care about being paid, but that's not everyone. Your whole view is a simplistic take on what it takes to make you specifically happy and that's why you think is easy.