But sadly accurate if you've never worked with a good manager. Good managers are rare, and people who have never worked with one err on the side of assuming all managers are pointless wastes of space.

Former software dev manager here. My job was split roughly into thirds - babysitting and mediating team issues, running interference to keep the executives out of my team's hair and bird-dogging HR and payroll issues. I would walk around sometimes and see if anyone needed me to expedite something or clear a blocker and I would go do it. (We were lucky in that we were working on something interesting and kind of ground-breaking so we didn't need a lot of "team building" rah rah to get everyone to work up the enthusiasm to work on a product nobody really cared about.)

Most managers are blissfully unaware how negative productive they are.