To rise means to manage people and budget. Higher the better. Kelly Johnson's 14th rule is never followed:
"Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay, not based on the number of personnel supervised."
https://jalopnik.com/legendary-skunk-work-founder-kelly-john...
If you don’t mind all of that then you should apply. There’s always a ton of openings for technical managers.
Plus, most people in tech got into their field because they like tech. Managing people isn't nearly as fun or rewarding to them.
due to product/program/project managers making a case for themselves to lead these teams. it might work in most of the cases, but clearly does not in engineering intensive projects - because the lens required to look at and deliver these projects is more than input/output, deadlines/deliverables.
understanding the subject is necessary to make smart tradeoffs (common scenario in projects that are as large scale as this one), but few of these folks do.
engineering enterprises that have often become successful owe it in their early days to majority of management having technical expertise. this is not a need once the companies become large, but such attitude does show up as inefficiency holes, if one knows where to look.