I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.
It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.
Outside laboratory science, the expectation to bring in funding is not as strong. You don't need much money to do research, and grants are not as readily available. As far as the administration is concerned, if you do your teaching duty without too many issues, you can use the rest of your time as you see fit. Academic politics revolve more around personal relationships with the tenured people at your department.
I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.
Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.
Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.
There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.