Yes the average ones are like that but the good ones I have seen provide a broader perspective, simplify solution, prevent the excited devs from trying out complicated solution with hyped but unsuitable technologies among other things. They save so much time and effort of an org that they are much more valuable than many managers.

So many self-proclaimed architects who do literally the opposite.

Agree there are, but that's why you can usually spot the ones who aren't, quite readily.

We need extra layers and proxies! For, uh, security reasons!

Depends on the company.

Big orgs with lots of outsourcing, architects are supposed to police the result to make sure it's semi decent. But since they've long since gave up doing any real work, they tend to be people who buy really expensive crap to cover their arse.

In smaller orgs, it can almost be just a lead dev with a fancy title.

Rarely does the title seem appopriate, but some of the folks with the title are good regardless.

I’d like to think I’m one of the people who manage to do good despite the title. I see the job more as technical review (like code review, but at a higher level taking into account how systems interact, and existing solutions used in other places). Sometimes I’ll also try to drive the adoption of technology which has the potential to improve systems - in those cases I’ll typically be the one doing exploratory work to validate the solution is viable at all, and then working with other developers to introduce it.

Its taken a while to get to this point, with a fair bit of pushing back on more traditional project management stuff, but I’m ridiculously happy with what I get to do for a living now. That was definitely not true when I was in a pure technical management role, where 80% of my week was spent in meetings.

You probably fit the "principle engineer" or "technical lead" titles better. But it's hard, because no doubt in many companies these titles have been corrupted* to mean something else.

End of the day, if you're happy and delivering value your title doesn't really matter. But it might when you want to move role in the future, so you might want to keep one eye on what the market is branding you as.

Fow what it's worth, I'm glad you're happy with your role. :)

*or maybe just changed, who am I to decide what words mean

I know different teams assign or utilize architects in different ways. One option is just as team leader/senior developer who evaluates design choices and helps to make final decisions on the plan. But I think it's more helpful when an architect has visibility into multiple systems and can give high level insight into how everything will work together.