Good Project Managers, Business Analysts, or Development Managers are much rarer than good Developers IME, and overall much more important IMO.
I'm a Developer. My wife is an Senior Operations Manager (head of the Business Analysts as well as some other roles). If I had to pick between having me on a team, or her, I'd pick her in a heartbeat. And there's not developer I know or have worked with that would make me rethink that choice.
Because she can make a lot of "OK" individuals and build a "Great", effective team.
IME you can easily have a number of "Great" individuals and end up with a "Failing" team without the management piece.
Also, this is maybe just me, but it really gets under my skin when I hear "great managers are there to run interference and give developers the room to do great things". That's absolutely false. I've been a Manager. I've tried to do that. It only ends up in failure. You do that and all you'll get are half baked projects that blow the budget nine times out of ten.
Great Managers delegate. They don't try to code. They get metrics. On everything. Just like the unquestioned advice about getting metrics for every aspect of your application, it's even more important to have metrics for your development. How long does it take to add a Form to the application? Is the Database involved in this Change Request? What does the Deployment Procedure look like? These things are in fact quantifiable, estimatable and predictable given experience and data if you know how to break them up.
Give people room to spike something, but when it isn't working out use the data to see that and kill it so you don't end up in a swamp. Don't try to be a Developer and a Manager at the same time. Until you've done every bit of your job you could possibly do in Management you don't get to go on recess playing Developer.
My wife's RFPs deliver within 93% of the hours estimate. It takes money to get there, but you put the effort in ahead of time, while it's just paper, when Change Requests are cheap. You try to avoid iteration of code during development because it's 10X the price at that point. You're able to plan budgets, quarters, quantify contributions, get people compensated fairly, make sure no one is ever working nights or weekends.
The worst slogs/most expensive projects I've ever worked on have had the least planning and most iteration during development. The best projects, where you felt you actually accomplished something every day, where you could see the light at the end of the tunnel because the whole thing was estimated and so far you're able to fairly accurately predict the accuracy of the estimates, have been far and away the most successful both in cost and client satisfaction.
That's my experience anyways.
All that just to say: If you're interested in the Software Development field and want the best chance at having an impact, changing people's lives for the better: Be a great Manager. And that's not necessarily the one the "cool" developers think you should be.