I find it funny that management started referring to themselves as leadership in the recent decades. Maybe some are, but most are your run of the mil administrators that carry out whatever upper management says. Hardly leadership.
I think you are generally wrong. Yes, ‘manager’ carries with it a certain amount of administrative and organisational responsibilities, not to mention the important ‘soft skills’ with conflict resolution and the like. But to deny or minimise the value of providing leadership is to miss the forest for the trees. The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense. They are the cool, rational, respected hands that provide guidance, break ties in debates and help drive the team/s forward. They are required to think strategically at times, and are certainly invaluable tactically.
We are all accountable to someone, all the way up to the CEO (who is accountable to the board). To diminish the role and contribution of managers at the bottom of the management stack is to be wilfully ignorant of the value they are providing.
Good managers are leaders, but this is far from universal.
Most orgs have no shortage of managers who used be good individual contributors, and who were pushed into the management track due to seniority when the previous manager left, or who wanted the pay bump, but have no real leadership ability and have no business being there.
A good organisation will be good at offering opportunity to the right people and giving them the tools they need. I agree that a good org is rarer than it should be, which is probably the source of much cynicism.
Leading is having an affect on those around you such that they voluntarily look to your for input.
Any role at a company can do that, so to try to pretend that falls directly on management lines is a white lie managers tell themselves.
Some technical people are terrible at helping juniors in their careers, and relatively poor communicators. Their job is "get the thing built" or "maintain the servers".
Managers support each report in succeeding not just at their job but their career, and are an escalation point for cross-team conflict, among other things.
"Roles" never do anything. People do things.
Just because somebody's job-description says something doesn't guarantee that persons contributes anything -- e.g. the CEO of yahoo who refused to buy google for 1 billion dollars.
I would not be a good doctor, for example.
It's a fine opinion to have, but on matters like this, I'm more interested in the opinions of those who are being lead. Plenty of leaders love to think of themselves as great leaders.
You seem to have an axe to grind and that is fine. Someone might have wronged you in some way but you don't really say how or why.
If you need to vent, then feel free - we are all friends here, within reason (but don't say names - it's best that way).