Middle management is a thankless job.
The people I manage think I don't deserve to earn more than them — I don't know enough to fix or build the niche feature they are building, and they, not me, should be the ones getting paid, because they're doing all the real, hard work.
Upper management thinks I'm paying this person too much — that I should give him more and more work to squeeze out returns, and that if the work isn't getting done from the team, then he must be incompetent.
But middle management is the most difficult job, for a few reasons. You need the ability to zoom out and speak in the language of upper management — to see their vision — and then zoom in on the specific technical problem being discussed by the team. And when you manage multiple teams working on very different things, you need to keep a lot of context in your memory: connect the dots, see who works best where, and figure out how to not upset the engineer doing the actual work — or the upper management who is bringing in the money.
Here is the thing — you don't really need middle managers. Fire them, and you'll see everything run smoothly. Until it doesn't — because the middle managers you fired already set things in motion, and there's momentum. A successful middle manager is the one who makes things so smooth between multiple projects that the teams can actually work without them — like pure air, which nobody appreciates until you and your family start to develop lung issues.
Middle managers are like air purifiers. Remove them, throw them out — until the whole thing starts to crumble.