Depends on your definition of "direct," but it includes skip-levels. This is what some of the other comments were referring to with growing your team large enough you end up with managers reporting to you.

I've been an IC reporting to a manager, who himself reported to a manager (as opposed to director or senior manager), and while the second one was technically my skip it was more like I just had two direct supervisors.

no, he's referring to the total size of the team, not directly