Ask HN: What are solution architects doing at your company?

TL; DR: Other than facilitating conversations and owning solution process, what concrete value are solution architects creating at your workplace?

I'm trying to understand what to expect from the SA role.

Some developers are great at solving most difficult problems, identifying potential issues and preventimg them early. That kind of work is so much more valuable than writing code so they become solution architects to do that full-time. Which is great. I think that's the idea.

But am I crazy in thinking that that's gone out of hand? What I'm seeing now is that, since these developers no longer write code, the industry decided that knowing how to code is not a requirement at all and a new wave of SAs emerged that supposedly create solution designs. In my experience, they create a lot of meetings (a.k.a 'facilitating technical conversations' or 'leading brainstorming sessions') where they tell developers about the problems and developers tell how to solve and they write it down. Anything that requires some form of technical analysis, like reading and understanding an SDK documentation and advise on to use it are beyond the skillset of the new wave SA. Writing down guidence for how to implement something is 'implementation details' and should be done by developers or tech leads.

Do these sound normal and how it works in your company? Or your SAs can actually read and understand SDK/API documentation (of public projects or of other companies'), design an API or define inputs/outputs of a software, create a system diagram to show developers what to build etc.?

Thanks!