Certainly, long term development of employees is part of that third, and a significant one at that. But much of growth is subtle - it's about looking at project

Certainly, long term development of employees is part of that third, and a significant one at that. But much of growth is subtle - it's about looking at projects and going, "Person A can get it done quickly but Person B would grow and appreciate the task, and Person C feels a bit of ownership over a part of it, and will grab due to an assertive personality if I let them sort it out themselves. So I'm going to have to massage a few egos here.) That doesn't take a lot of time but it is definitely emotional labor. Emotional labor can be hard to quantify, and so outside of 1:1s and ad-hoc goal setting meetings and reviews, it's both important and hard to quantify in terms of time. Further, it's another task that can be a peer task - that is, it's something that technical leads can do for their teams and management can reassign the rest. The original comment was talking about taking out most of management, so it's probably something they wouldn't consider as a key management priority that couldn't be done by developers.