However, This is just wordplay redefining the concept building.
If the purpose is maintenance, it is maintaining.
IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.
Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.
While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.
It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.