Did the focus on ‘self managing’/‘empowered’ teams lower the bar for engineering management?

Thoughts: It seems to me that the idea and focus on ‘self managing’ or empowered teams is a relatively recent phenomenon. I think it came to fruition together with the mainstream adoption of agile. But I have less than 10 YOE, so I could be wrong. Please let me know if so.

In my professional career, I’ve reported to 7 different engineering managers. With almost all of them but one or two, I felt like they were just not ‘cut out’ to be a manager. Every single one of them was an engineer at some point. In my opinion, they were all way too laid back.

I’ve faced serious problems, for instance with one toxic and obsessive senior that was bulldozing the project for ‘the perfect’ rewrite that took 4 months (in isolation) and required the whole team to learn custom systems and fix new bugs.. I blocked the PRs for the risks I tried to mediate and find ways to mitigate those risks, but he wouldn’t budge - when he started harassing me on personal texts, I flagged this to our manager. He heard our sides of the story, but would not make a decision, instead he put it on us as a team to ‘resolve’.

And I’ve seen this more often, where situations call for actual leadership and it’s simply not there. That got me wondering, was it always this bad, or did the management trends somehow strip them of any decisive power?