For a long time I felt that way as well. There are days when I still do, and this is from my current perspective as a tech lead who spends ~50% of their time in

For a long time I felt that way as well. There are days when I still do, and this is from my current perspective as a tech lead who spends ~50% of their time in meetings with other parts of the company. Sadly once a team scales up past a certain size its not practical to have developers also going out, finding out what people want built, and handling all the feedback on that. You need someone (or a team of someones) gathering the often conflicting requests coming in, and prioritising them against each other. Having said that, I do believe once a piece of work makes it to a point where people are likely to start working on it the developers who will be doing that work should be involved in the process. They should understand not only what is being requested, but also why its being requested, in my experience that often results in them suggesting alternative solutions that either bet solve the problem, or provide a 90% solution with significantly less cost. It also gives them the context needed when deciding on technical trade-offs involved in different design choices.