This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
The issue was that my management chain was concerned that my time was too valuable to be spent writing code. And there's a yes-and-no in this one. I was a reasonably well paid US-based software engineer, so yes, my time was valuable. And yes, some of the non-coding tasks I performed were probably more impactful than writing code. But... code + machine parsable specifications + docs + tests are very good ways of communicating exactly what you want.
I'm just sort of laughing thinking about what my old management chain would think if they knew our India based devs and I were using TLA+ as the core of our specification / documentation. Actually, I doubt they would understand it.