That is actually an excellent point. As a senior developer you need to be able to leverage your experience. That is, being able to make decisions, being able to teach and mentor, etc.
Answering from my position. I didn't get responsibility for more systems, or bigger projects, or things like that. They made me responsible for the technical side of production. All of it, zero wiggle room.
Overall, I would not consider myself a manager. I don't have disciplinary rights, even in my team. I guess if I want someone gone, they will leave the company, but I'm no disciplinary superior.
And in my space, technical considerations still dominate. My decisions just cost more or less, affect availability, maintainability, support of our software, alow teams to go faster.
I code less chef and terraform, yeah. I'd like to do so more. But fuck me, it's better for my team to tell people to do as my team wants. It's better for me to keep my head above single resources and servers, so we keep a tactical view.
I've found that organizational structure and politics become a limiting factor past a certain level of skill and experience.
That is, for one engineer to be obviously worth the price of three or four others, they'll need more responsibility and resources somehow.
In finance, the responsibility is easy to delegate: it's the size (actual money) of decisions they'll be making. In generic software, how do you do the same thing? All the code on X servers? Primary responsibility and merge privileges on Y repos? There are interesting experiments and answers in this space, but most shops aren't oriented to think that way.