It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy.
A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
That's a tired and specious argument that might have held water if Apple were only successful for a year or two. There are a myriad of devices from competitors who also had large marketing budgets but eventually disappeared into the night.
But it's essentially been 13 years (if you only start counting from the introduction of the iPhone). Great engineering/product deserves a big marketing budget. They go hand in hand.