So then would the true top "Engineering" role just be lead dev? This is the role I am more interested in. Having to keep up with the state of the field to me as an engineer/CS is A: more fun, and B: more rewarding.

If anything this blog post (along with others) just keeps confirming that CTO is something I never want to be.

Edit: I should also mention that it is practice at my current company that our leads basically are the ones that consider the balance of implementation details and whether we do rewrites vs. staged refactoring. Not the CTO. This definitely seems like more of an engineering call.