> While I certainly see evidence of this in the workplace, I also see that this kind of leader would be exceptionally valuable to any organization.

You'd think!!

I have a few theories as to why this is so:

The most charitable interpretation is that, since technically competent business leaders are so incredibly rare (set aside that every engineer thinks they can do it), there's no design pattern for that leader. Ownership is ritually divided into COO/CTO/CFO, and of those CTO is linearly defined. Technical leaders are excluded from non-technical discussions by default, and norms are extremely hard to break.

^ This is why I recommend against great Engineers doing an MBA. There's just no role at Amazon/Google/etc. for that profile beneath the VP level, reporting trees for engineers/business branch at the second tier and never meet thereafter.

A different perspective is that in a sufficiently technical organization (ie: everyone, these days), technology is a giant black box to the rest of the leadership team. It's a big part of the budget and a massive component of success, yet completely opaque and unfamiliar to someone who rose up through sales/marketing/etc. In their minds, the CTO already has an outsize impact, and surrendering to them more scope is scary.