In my experience the issue arises not because managers are treating the position as a privilege. Rather the opposite. A regular person one day becomes a manager

In my experience the issue arises not because managers are treating the position as a privilege. Rather the opposite. A regular person one day becomes a manager. They feel the same today as the day before. They feel the new power is fake, or theoretical. It becomes easy to joke about this power. In their head the joke is funny because of irony. "How could I have power? I'm just a regular person." A further issue is the mismatch in weight given to their words over their intention. Even I hit this, once my employee told me he gave strong weight to a point I had casually mentioned. For once in my life someone remembered what I said better than me. It was a bit worrying, as my exact comment had been meant to be a minor point. Thankfully I knew prior to "getting power" to, as I word it, "never make jokes which imply a power structure". As the listener can never truly know if the joke was speaking to an unsaid idea.