You ARE a manager, but they’re calling it tech lead. There are (or used to be?) companies where tech lead does not have management duties.

I was torn between the tech/management split. It seemed management was unavoidable. A really good VP Eng. advised me: if you hate management, just don’t do it. You will be bad at it and you will hate your life. That was excellent advice, that served me well.

You are doing management and you don’t want to. Fix that.

I've found most tech lead jobs to be heavy on the leadership. Leadership could be separated from management, but I find today it rarely is.

The best tech leads I've worked with have owned that, and helped their team do the tech while leading the work from a high level. The worst have insisted on holding in to low level work, letting their team suffer without direction.

It could be a company problem, it could be a leader problem, but in my experience it's been a company/leader communication problem, or a leader failing to follow through on what they agreed to.