I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it's your duty or you have no choice, but that's different from wanting it). Leadership is a huge burden.
PS: One of the people on my first team after graduating has been on stress-related leave for months, and I saw "award-winning leadership" watch it happen and only start caring once it became a legal risk.
Highly idealized, but something to aspire to nevertheless.
From above you're still receiving ill-conceived and/or badly specified projects and have very limited influence to make them more sensible.
So day-to-day you're trying to build nicely architected software which will never quite do the thing it really needs to do, and you're doing it by herding cats. There's little time left for actual programming, unless you're working at weekends rewriting your team's commits which is basically a failure state.
(I think wherever you are in the chain there are significant downsides, though I will say that in 20+ years I've only ever experienced non-technical management as an impediment to success.)