In my massive company's IT org, there is a specific architect role and they do everything wrong that you could think of with slowing work down, being disengaged etc.

But in the actual engineering side of the business the software engineer groups are not labeled as such except maybe within a team. Everyone is a software engineer and the level 4 or 5 SWE simply makes design decisions. They review code, optimize stuff, rip things apart, sometimes end up trashing it all, never commit anything, etc. But if they find some major change that needs to happen THEN it flows down for us to implement and commit.

Works incredibly well. But this is at a lower level... say a team of 5-10 people.