Engineers do the work to make the magic happen. Too much middle management adds fat and gets in the way of work getting done. I say this as a GenXer who has been on both sides and is currently an engineer again. I have no beef with designers.

Engineers do plenty wrong. But they typically don’t lead the effort, they implement the ideas and plans of designers and managers. So tradition in society is to put the burden of success or failure at the feet of those who do the planning.

If you have someone buying the wrong seeds or not ordering fertilizer on time, it makes all the work on the farm a failure.

They're not mutually exclusive. Plenty of managers have engineering backgrounds. What is generally mutually exclusive is managers and individual contributors. It may be that if individual contributors did all the decision-making then the outcome would be different; it may be that it would be exactly the same. We can't really know, for the same reason we can't know how society would be different if we elected "normal people" to Congress instead of "politicians."