I've never worked in any example of this fictitious organization where seniors are too important and well paid to write the code, so they just wave conductor's batons to orchestrate juniors into doing all the work.
It is most definitely a thing, and that is how my job worked when I was at Microsoft, in three different roles. All of the senior people I worked for definitely could code (one of them was well-known in the memory management research space), and they would occasionally do so. But largely, they focused on the big picture, and virtually all of my interactions with them was over a whiteboard. I was very surprised when I first got there that they basically never wanted to put eyeballs directly on my code; they preferred to talk to me about it. As a junior person, developing the fluency to have whiteboard conversations was difficult. But when we’d leave the meetings I would have a much clearer idea about what I should do, and perhaps more importantly, what I should not do. In all of those projects, 100% of the code was written by me and other junior people.
> 100% of the code was written by ... junior people.
No offense, but it kind of shows with every product by that company I've touched over the years. But then again they are largely not a technology company. More like a lobbying firm that happens to be very good at politicking to get their wares on every enterprise PC. The quality doesn't even matter, since most of their end users are a captive audience.