>More of a tech lead myself, but my personal policy is that I put my coworkers above my career. I am willing to quit before doing anything to throw them under the bus or be fired before remaining silent if they are treated unfairly... Maybe that's one reason I am not a manager,

Yep, that is what ended my management career. I became a middle manager a few years before the pandemic, but I'm back to being an IC again. I just couldn't handle managing through that first few months of the pandemic and how my bosses wanted me to treat my direct reports. Unless you are working on some lifesaving or world changing job, which almost none of us are, I just couldn't imagine prioritizing my job over my coworkers. Why put the profits of some people I don't know above the lives of people I worked with every day? It's a messed-up world that this opinion makes me a bad manager.