I once worked for a startup co-founded by people who created DirectX at Microsoft

This is exactly right. Years ago, very early in my career, I rotated among a few teams at the company, and even then, one manager stood out as different from the others. I straight-up asked him if he had a philosophy or something, and this is what he said: "Yeah, my job as a manager has three parts. First, get the right people for the job. Second, get them the resources they need. Third, get everything else out of their way." Decades later, this still rings true. That team was the most productive I've ever seen.

> There is a book written on how DirectX was created and what went on inside the team during those initial days of DirectX. what's the title? the number of books on programming with directx sort of drowns out the search results.

This always gets stated - "Removing roadblocks". But if the engineer isn't removing roadblocks on their own and collaborating with other teams, then they get labeled as "lacking initiative". People managers really don't deserve a place in the software industry. More often than not, they are the real roadblocks.