I'm pretty sure there were companies doing stupid things in the old days but in my experience, back then managers were supposed to know what developers were doing, and if they were delivering value or not.

They did all that by walking around, chatting with everyone, helping devs, assigning tasks depending on the expertise level, sometimes doing boring work (like manual testing) to help devs, etc.

Of course, if a manager that has to handle Jira and Scrum meetings all day, then it gets difficult to do that.

I wrote games until 1995, then started at Apple. I worked at Apple until 2021 when I retired.

Apple very much was engineer-driven when I began. That changed when Steve Jobs returned.