I haven’t had a lot of luck with architects. In one case I came to a company that got rid of their architect and hired me and another person to replace him (to be fair they were too small to warrant a full time role anyway, not sure what they were thinking).

Especially in the post refactoring era, they tend to have an inaccurate account of what the code is actually like and make bad calls based on bad info. It’s a responsibility that works better when the people have their hands in the code. I’ve had better luck with Architecture as a job description shared by the lead developers. In large enough companies they have Staff Engineer that scratches that itch with perhaps slightly less people skills (though I really don’t recommend it).

yep, if your architects don't have their hands directly on the code, they're making bad decisions.

People talk about enterprise architects as these pie-in-the-sky people who shit diagrams and everything works wonderfully. In practice it's "seagull architecting", with everyone else forced to deal with the reality on the ground.

At some scale architects need to be more hands off. When that happens they need to have a _very_ strong relationship with the people on the ground or it doesn't work well. Even then I would argue they should be getting their hands dirty in terms of reading code, etc, they just may not have time for implementation duties.