Author here. There are some managers that do need such babysitting, particularly if you are in a non-tech industry.

Thanks for the comment. I realized I didn't mention when this kind of tactics might be useful. Added the following paragraph to the end of my post:

> At this point, you might start to wonder: What kind of incompetent managers deserve this degree of babysitting? They probably don’t in the tech industry, but not every engineer work at a tech company. They might be in retail, fashion, film production, etc., where there just happened to have a need for software development. Even those who do work in tech might wish to move to an industry that is less tech-centric, at which point these communication skills will prove handy.