The first job of a people manager is to set the vision, and inspire you to do your best, none of which requires technical skills. I believe this was even supported by empirical research Google did a year or so ago (I can't find it right now). Still, to lead an engineering org, I believe managers have to understand technology, too, otherwise they will make uninformed decisions which will end up hurting the product.
I'll give you an example: I interviewed someone a couple of days ago who had shipped large-scale real-time trading systems for a bank. He couldn't write a for loop. Fine. But I expected him to be able to do design an ETL pipeline. Couldn't do that either. How about basic functional design? Nope. At some point, I started questioning what value this person would add to the org.