I definitely see how it might seem like it would come across this way, but this was all within the context of a manager who went out of his way to establish him

I definitely see how it might seem like it would come across this way, but this was all within the context of a manager who went out of his way to establish himself with his team as someone who did _not_ consider him a technical expert compared to the engineers on the team (to the point where I think he honestly didn't recognize the full extent of his skills). It wasn't uncommon for him to tell people that the reason he switched from being an engineer to a manager was that he didn't think he was good enough at the engineering side of things to be successful at it. He viewed his job as doing whatever he could to make the people working for him successful, and that included setting the expectations that ideas should be judged on their own merits and not based on who they came from. This is obviously not something that just can happen because someone says it should, and I'm not really sure there's any amount of evidence I can offer to be convincing enough that he did try to maintain an environment of trust and lack of judgment, but I can at least say that I genuinely felt like that was the case, and that I only ever experienced and saw encouragement for us to consider any technical question, doubt, or feedback from one member of the team to another in good faith, regardless of the relative tenure or title of the people involved.