What you've said fits perfectly well with the sentence you disagree with. The person who came from a strong engineering background is probably not doing much (if any) engineering work now. That's totally fine and for some teams/companies/products, is exactly the background you need.
I see your point, but I see an implicit either-or choice in it. I must ask: would it not better for team cohesion and efficacy if managers were doing 30% engineering, and engineer had the option to have their word in management? I have experienced that, and although it was maybe more tiring for the manager on the short term, he was a real part of the team, and decisions were never taken in contradiction with technical factors. Vice versa, engineering was more targeted towards real customers needs that if we had no manager. On the long term, it was less work per product, because the more integrated team ran more efficiently.
I would question it too, as well as question other things. But I have no answer, answer, though. It's a hard ball of questions, a 100-people-block team...
