Middle management (above first line manager) in large organizations is hard to do well. I think it is difficult to understand if you have never done it, and it is even difficult to articulate why. I find it much much harder than working as an engineer or Eng Mgr.
Fundamentally, I think it is an incentive and systematic issue: what is expected of middle managers, and incentivized, requires almost complete dedication to managing up and laterally. People who spend time w/ their reports are the exceptions because there is close to 0 correlation with getting promoted. Caring about your report either require crazy number of hours, or ignoring what people above you will expect. The latter will ultimately affect their report.
Many people in that line of work do the minimum ? Yes, I can believe this. But the odds are stacked against you. I used to joke "as a middle manager, doing above average work requires extraordinary dedication".
1. Lack of agency: once you are above first line management (EM), you actually have much less agency. As an EM, you can tweak processes, and improve things. You only are accountable to your manager, and maybe 2-3 other people. Once you are above that, the number of stakeholders explodes, and any perception of failure will get at you. You can't say no to many useless meetings because you have to be there. If you don't go, and something goes wrong, guess whose teams/projects will be slashed next time.
2. Corollary: spooky action at a distance. Once you're middle manager, you will get random people with random level of competence ask you things you don't even understand. I regularly encountered "You have not done X yet, and this is slowing down other teams", and that was the first time I heard of X. Everybody knows you can't do half of what you are asked, but you better not be perceived as not doing all of it.
3. Solitude: As an EM, you can foster your team. Above, you just have a bunch of individuals who very much don't work as a team. Very difficult to keep some cohesion.
4. You need to own shit you are not responsible for: You have to explain often nonsensical decisions you had no authority on, but you also cannot say "sorry guys, this is coming from above".
5. Outside of exceptions, doing a good job is completely unrelated to how you will be evaluated. There are many things you know in your heart will negatively impact your team that you absolutely have to do. The best middle managers are the ones who manage to balance the kafkaiesque and still maintain good environment in their report line. This requires an enormous amount of time that you can only do for so long, most burn out quickly.
It is slightly over cynical, but I think avoiding what spakhm describers on his blog is impossible to escape above a certain size: https://www.spakhm.com/p/how-to-get-promoted