I spent about 6 months in management and it was the worst experience in my career. I will never do that again. I'm back to writing code. I don't know why anyone would want to be a manager.
I've been tacking towards "out of management" for a few years and it is not easy. Taking a "step down" is hard but only because of my own petty status-seeking and I've gotten past that. What I can't figure out is the salary problem. There are some developers who can get paid as well as I do, but not any in my industry where developers are a pure cost-center - I don't work in a software company. Changing industry with 7 year old tech skills (aside from open-source and side-projects) without taking a huge salary cut is impossible.
The appeal of being a manager to an engineer is the ability to allocate projects and work on the interesting stuff. Of course, very few managers get to actually do that-- it might be the 5 percent who have managerial titles but few or no reports, all of whom are pretty self-motivated.
It's similar to how you'll hear people in academia refer to "industry." It's a popular thing to put down.
The typical reasons why a developer might not like management are because you're spending more time with people instead of code, you're looking at the product at a higher level rather than dealing with the details of coding, you have to deal with more politics, and you might not have the tools to be successful (i.e. current set of employees were hired before you, not enough budget, other business decisions aren't compatible with success, etc.)
It was a great learning experience though, because before I became a manager I thought that was like a natural progression, something that I had to do, something that I felt I couldn't shirk from, something where people recognized me for my skills, but in reality it's just a shit job, a dead end, unless you're one of the few who advances up the latter, because you know what, all of my managers and my manager's managers were all just relaying their manager's will down the pyramid.
When you are a software engineer you see things you do create value. You build things that work and do stuff. When you're a manager, I have no idea what I contributed. What did I do last week where I earned my pay? I have no idea.
Anyway, I'm glad I survived and am back to writing code. It involved getting a new job at a new place as soon as possible before I got too rusty. I was writing code at home all that time so that helped.
I was curious because I had heard for quite a number of people who had switched tracks from engineer to management and found it unsatisfying but they didn't go into as much detail as you did in your post.