> but even a year away from hands on technical work is going to leave you likely stranded and unable to execute on the technical aspects

This is an interesting myth, but certainly a myth. I guess if we consider technical skill to be intimate knowledge of the latest fad framework, that might be one source of the myth. But that's not technical skills, just trivia about an implementation detail.

The fundamentals like networking, process and memory management, databases and SQL, all change slowly and are very long-lived career-spanning knowledge.