A bad middle manager tends to be a bad middle manager because they're empowered to do dumb things: set upcoming workload, badger people about adherence to mythical project schedule, etc.

The majority of these tasks could be devolved to the team itself, if an organization wanted to.

Without that political pressure, I'd trust even the worst IC on my team to serve in a manager role, because the consequences of them doing a poor job would be small.