One of the great dilemmas is that these things are always interwoven with the non-technical aspects of being a manager. There is some aspect in which it is essential - "how long will this work take" depends intimately on the technical complexity, exactly how skilled the available resources are in the necessary areas etc. Other aspects are completely non-essential - "responsibility for staff completing health and safety training lies with line management". I would really like to see a model where these are disentangled.
That's a good description. And the reality is that while, as you say, there are master engineers who can crank out great inventions largely autonomously, the vast bulk do so in large part by mentoring and guiding others. I know many distinguished engineers and SDEs who are ICs. But at least the ones I know spend most of their time communicating and working with others. Open source project maintainers often describe themselves as primarily editors.
Some are actually managers (which carry more formal administrative responsibilities) and some aren't. But almost none of them are largely working on their own because it's really hard (especially outside of a research context and even then) to have maximum impact that way.
My old boss said: "on the way to work in the morning, you should be whistling". I'm from The Netherlands, and I'm not sure if it translates well. But that's the point where I thought that I love engineering, stopped caring about what others may think, and put my management ambitions in the freezer.
Five years further, and I'm slowly coming back to that decision, but in a much more natural way. I started freelancing, took on an apprentice, and slowly I'm getting more responsibilities. But in a natural way, not an all-or-nothing choice.
So my advice is to set boundaries. If you don’t want to be sitting in meetings, then stand your ground or come to a compromise. If they don’t understand then quit! Find the path for you, life is too short to be unhappy and someone else’s pencil pusher.
But as always: ymmv
For what it's worth, I enjoy mentoring and explaining things, writing docs, and being involved in design of systems and influencing technical strategy. It's nice to be making technical choices. But when you're more familiar with a spreadsheet than an IDE, something has gone wrong.