This is a fundamental lie of corporate America. We have a problem with X so we hire an X dedicated worker:
The company hires (or transitions) managers and “People Ops” folk, who have the experience (or at least the time and mandate) to think about performance management of people on their teams.
Which is why there was a whole movement away from Ops to DevOps. Hiring a person solely responsible for X is a silo’ed doomed to failure idea from the start. Which is why startups so routinely outpace companies 100 times as large.
As soon as you hire a manager who no longer writes code you are on a very quickly ticking timer to Dilbert land.
The same principle is exactly the same for hiring a developer who will not own anything beyond externally assigned tasks. You don’t need that — much better off outsourcing such a position.
Neither ladder makes any sense they both equally lead to obsolescence. Nor should it be any surprise that such a simple strategy fails when it comes to something as difficult as software development.