"basically answering emails" is usually also done within a context of subject matter expertise and long term career experience. This is akin to saying "programmers just bang on a keyboard and clock out at the end of the day, easy!"
Maybe this isn't true in companies you've worked for, but it's still pretty common for "engineering manager" to be a title held by an MBA with no engineering knowledge.
I plainly said "I will do my best to do the deployments, but if deployment scripts fail, I will NOT risk customer data to complete this task".
The CTO overheard this dictate by our manager. The CTO backed me 100%. And, she was the previous syseng for our dept, and worked up the ranks from helpdesk->syseng->cto. Fucking sharp lady.