The turn off for me was when the article starts talking about what engineering is (Yonatan Zunger's article does the same thing, "Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers.").

I don't believe empathy, cooperation, collaboration or managing team is engineering. Engineering is human mind dealing with systems and things. Engineering is as much about empathy and collaboration, as much as HR is about being able to use payroll software. You need the latter to be able to do the job, but it isn't "all about" that.

Yes, if you want to go up, then after a certain point you need to get into management, (like the article says "Senior engineers must manage teams", but must manage teams does not mean engineering somehow is about managing teams), but writing documentation, sitting in meetings, being on calls and reviewing other people's code is not engineering. It's not what excited me as a kid, and it's not the reason why in my free time from job I tinker stuff and write code (and nearly every Sr engineer in my team whom I respect does that). I have seen people quit of being a great tech lead to join a startup as a developer, mostly because they felt that something within them was dying.