For roughly a year, I actually outranked my boss. I did the engineering, and he dealt with schedules, priorities, communicating upward, etc. It was a great relationship, because we both had jobs to do, and we did them.
In the 21st century, we're getting beyond the point where the hierarchy of authority is accompanied by a hierarchy of knowledge or expertise. In the 19th century business of my imagination, the head clerk knew more about clerking than the junior clerk. A manager was expected to know more about management and business.
Today, people change jobs and fields throughout their careers. It's not unusual for a manager to have subordinates who have been managers themselves, or who have even run entire businesses. People know more about the behavior of the businesses that they work for, than they can learn from management pronouncements, because we can read about the behavior of similar businesses. Managers have diverse staffs. I don't expect my boss to be knowledgeable about my field, because he's a chemist and I'm a physicist.
That doesn't sound like you outranked him. He scheduled your time, set your priorities, and was gatekeeper to the broader organization.
You could just as easily view the situation as the manager providing an interface to the rest of the company, and helping with organisation - somewhat secretarial role.
It was a different kind of relationship. My job comes with a fair amount of autonomy and authority. I'm trusted to communicate with people directly, and consider that to be a vital part of how I do my job.
And the department is "matrix" organized, so there's a lot of cross communication.
Anyway, the rank inversion was temporary, and was just a matter of having different numerical rankings for "technical track" and "management track" employees.
Not 'synergistic' enough to be adopted.
Don't misunderstand, I'm always competing with my last paycheck. I always want to be getting paid more. I just don't care about other people's salary and if our responsibilities are lesser/equal/greater.
For me its all about optimizing the things I can control. I can control my future paycheck, and I can control how much effort I need to be putting in from week to week. I can't control someone else's salary, and it can't negatively effect me, so why expend the energy thinking about it?
Meanwhile: Responsibility != Effort.
For me its all about correcting mistakes with the least effort possible (I'm lazy you see). Also, if I'm paid the same, and I input less effort, then I'm technically being paid more :)
I would way rather put in the minimal effort required to question and correct (i.e. "manage" as you put it) an error upfront while its an idea, whoever's idea that might have been, rather than to put in the effort to correct the error while shit is hitting the fan.
This is just my personal preference. Your milage may vary.
I regularly managed people that made 20-30% more than I did. That was usually corrected within a raise-cycle or two, but it was by no means unusual. I don't think I ever had a direct report that was paid less than 75% of what I got, let alone 50%.
The higher up the org chart someone is, the more high-level their view is, not from ignorance but from necessity. They can easily have ideas that sound great on paper but might not be so great once you account for the nuts and bolts of whatever subsystem(s) would have to change to implement that idea. So if a manager proposes an idea that only sounds good in theory but would be a terrible idea in practice, management needs to rely on their engineers to do their part and explain when and why that is.
It's kind of a dance with a lot of gray areas, because engineers/managers/designers all have their own biases and blind spots and gaps in knowledge, and prioritize things differently. But as long as everyone knows what they're doing and can communicate effectively to people with different backgrounds, it's ideal.
Of course there are plenty of terrible managers who don't know what they don't know and don't take useful feedback. And there are terrible engineers who don't know how to provide useful feedback. But with ideal personnel and a good power dynamic, everyone works together in such a way as to cancel out each other's blind spots and add to each other's expertise.