Yeah that could be the case. In my experience companies slice their software products in tiny slices and give a tiny slice to engineers, which is technically easy. Then after a few years there is real pressure to move away from doing hands-on technical work and just manage your own team of engineers with their tiny slices.

Instead of doing that, companies could structure to have less engineers with more technical work, and letting them specialize over many years. But part of the incentive is not wanting any one engineer to have too much knowledge in efforts to make them replaceable. It's an unfortunate side effect of how companies optimize things, and the consumer has no way to know or select this at the market level.