I've spent almost all of the last decade as a first and second level manager and recently returned to an IC engineering role. I don't think any company large enough to have a handful of managers has homogeneity in what you're talking about. The worst companies for engineers to work at have pockets of bliss (been there). Fantastic companies have pockets of despair (been there, too). And any given pocket doesn't look the same from different perspectives. From my experience as a manager, I think the vast majority of managers (not all!) care deeply about the success of the company and the team. But there is so much information that can't be shared that we, as engineers, are left to draw sweeping conclusions like "they are incompetent" or "they don't care" or "they only care about their own career". Let me give a little of what I've seen in the hopes it will make things bit more understandable, even if it's not as sensible / hopeful as we'd all like.

What you are expressing disappointment about is not limited to engineers and their direct managers. An effective manager needs to help their reports understand upper management's perspective ("I know that you were hoping we'd prioritize Y, but here's why we're doing X instead") and help their own managers (Directors, VPs, etc.) understand the perspective of their reports ("engineers are consistently raising the same issues about X that I raised during planning, can we reconsider doing Y instead?"). They are very much caught in the middle, and it's the same all the way up - execs have to do this with the board and major investors. If there is anyone in the management chain that either doesn't understand the connection between what is valuable for stakeholders and what ICs can provide, then you are going to experience the things that appear to be frustrating you. The only hope is that there is someone between you and the weak link in the chain that can somehow create space for you to create more value. I've been that "umbrella" at times and it was too taxing for me to sustain - it's a big part of why I wanted to return to being an IC (i.e., to regain my own sanity). Lack of understanding of that connection between value and capabilities can be subjective or objective.

By subjective, I mean that given the same inputs, different people will come up with different strategies for applying capabilities to create value. To the extent your strategy agrees with those above you, things will be easier for you and the decisions that come down will look more sensible to you. Many of the best managers try to reconcile these differences to get the best outcome they can for everyone. They find alignment. That's easier where the gap is smaller (e.g., some ICs' views will be better aligned with upper management to start with) and harder where the gap is larger. A classic source of mismatch here is that upper management is often incentivized to get short term results (e.g., by public markets or just to make payroll) and engineers are often incentivized to get long term results (because we directly experience any cost of shortcuts taken to get short term results).

By objective, I'm referring more to understanding things like what a team is capable of. At one point I managed a team that had a very different expertise than almost everyone else in the company. When there was enough understanding of that in upper management to let it be leveraged, things were great. But when the difference was not understood, then decisions came down that made perfect sense for other teams but not for this team. People in management who don't understand that they don't understand the capabilities (or how leveraging those capabilities looks different from leveraging other capabilities) can do a lot of damage here because they don't know that they should ask/learn/delegate. And they don't know how to interpret the resulting problems that they see. When that manager who doesn't understand is a front line EM, I've seen significant confusion from engineers as they try to understand what they are seeing (e.g., my performance reviews appear random, my manager doesn't care about the quality of my solutions, I'm the only one on the team who knows/enjoys doing X and and X is never assigned to me, etc.).

Also keep in mind that feedback loops can send people in bad directions. I've seen front line managers move up to have 2 or 3 levels of managers beneath them very quickly because of a simple, well intentioned technique that can lead to terrible outcomes. The technique is to pick a single metric for each team and tie people's performance evaluation (and therefore pay) to that one metric (sometimes the entire team, sometimes just EM and/or PM). That metric goes up quickly because people are highly motivated. Initially it happens by picking low hanging fruit with good results. But soon it means cannibalizing other metrics and at some point the trade-offs no longer make sense for stakeholders, but they keep going because somebody will get a bad performance review if they don't (side "benefit" - performance reviews are easier for management and appear objective if they only have to look at one metric). And all along the way it shifts the focus from a mix of short and long term investments to purely short term investments. The metric also loses its value as a metric in the process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Management is an incredible maze of things like the above. Many managers, including some who are doing a fantastic job, aren't even aware that they're grappling with all of that and much more. With all of that going on, it's impressive that many manage the kind of empathy the article talks about. I think the majority of managers are well meaning and making things much better for most of us. But the human problems are so daunting that it's hard to see the upsides (which are often just a reduction in the challenges inherent in working with tens/hundreds/thousands of people) from where we sit as engineers. The worst managers are adding to those challenges and are a disaster, but they tend to be a self correcting problem because their reports often don't to stick around very long.

So, in many ways, the deeper view of management is both better (there are certainly exceptions, but many care and are impressively competent) and worse (many of the problems are inherent in human interaction and management is left to pick solutions that address a strict subset of those problems, with minefields of misleading feedback loops) than you might be thinking if you haven't seen it from the inside at different levels.