"It's not what you know, it's who you know"

Honestly just the fact you can become a coder and get paid for it is impressive, by the historical human society average.

I once worked with an SVP at a huge corporation that liked to engage in "bike shedding". This guy is like seven rungs above me on the ladder and is trying to tell me what fields each SQL table should have.

Then we got a new department director who was very good at keeping upper management distracted and off our backs. Lots of people in middle management don't justify their own salaries but I would argue that he sure did.

Seems to me, for  most successful companies, it does. Can you name a few successful companies past 50, making money, that don't have management? 

There is little to no evidence, even in academic studies, typically a pro labor progressive environment, that management is not needed beyond small projects.