The army figured it out. The Officers are in charge, but the sergeants get shit done. In engineering, your leads/supervisors are the sergeants.
Officer quality varies between complete shitbird and Julius Ceasar. Either way, the army marches.
Their main weapon is pestering you.
How hard is it to answer that question?
I just ran into this response yesterday, and I ended up going over his head (unfortunately) and asked our DBAs for a recommendation. DBA solution worked faster than either of the previous two solutions. I still need to apologise for that one.
Curious. Running an idea by people to get their thoughts, because it's currently leaving you short on warm fuzzies... is something to apologize for?
The initial solution was low on warm fuzzies for him. Your second solution was low on warm fuzzies for you. So you explored further. Where's the problem?
If you come from a strong technical background when first promoted (Being the go-to expert on the team or similar) then you can probably keep the respect of the team for a while but eventually others will rise to fill the gap (After all there is 95% of a rockstar programmer's time missing in the team). At that point your comments on code reviews will mostly be seen as micro management.
I would say that there are two ways to go about it, either fully trust your developers and let them develop and review their own code or stay as an active member of the team, doing as much coding as you can fit into your schedule. Which route you pick of course depends on the workload of managerial duties.
Reading lots of code also gives a broader perspective than writing lots of code, which requires a sort of tunnel vision. Both the deep and the broad perspective are useful on a team.
The amount a developer (not manager) should code varies from domain to domain. In my work, 5% may be on the low side. But I'd argue in most domains, if you're spending more than 20-30% of your time coding, you're overdoing it and creating too much technical debt.
I'm not a manager, but if I were, I'd promote the folks who find (good) reasons not to code than to code. Some problems need software to solve a problem. But writing software should be a last resort.
Of course, if you're writing throwaway code on a code base that won't last more than a year or two, code away. Technical debt is not a big concern.
Then about the 5% - this is high prio, high visibility fixes where you bring in your extraordinary expertise in some domain. Believe me, that's enough to stay respected. Your time is much better spent at sparring systems architecture & high level design, hiring and building well-oiled teams and discussing the business needs with the rest of the company.
Isn't as fun, Doesn't feel as good, but it helps most the long run. The alternative is a high performance coding monkey that gets a tiny area of the company right - and the rest of IT goes wild and rewrites core APIs in the latest three hype language because "we needed to get rid of technical debt".
The 44 lessons of the OP are distilled gold from years of experience, I rehearse them every year and can recommend them to any aspiring tech lead.