I've had similar experiences over the years. I started out at a startup with inexperienced founders, which resulted in micromanagement and eventually my departure after a few years. I was then hired on at a couple traditional server hosting companies that have been repositioning themselves as cloud hosts. At one of the hosting companies, I did have some measure of autonomy but politics and micromanagement were in full swing.
Most recently, I had worked at a BigCo that I left a few months ago. The environment was soul-crushing and toxic. The experiences wore me out mentally and put my health at risk, so I left.
I'm still trying to figure out the next step myself, whether it be leaving the field for something else or starting my own company. For me, it has meant a lot of introspection and lurking on sites like this.
To me, what you said seems like the other technical people that don't write code would be considered "non-technical", which doesn't make sense to me. I, for example, don't write code but I'm far from non-technical. So... I'm still confused.
Sometimes I'll skim the documentation on a certain technology if I expect I'll be asked on it, but most of the time I don't really do any sort of preparations. My experiences cover a lot of the technical questions I'm asked, so I usually have a quick answer.
My first job was employee #1 doing software development and sysadmin work for a non-funded startup in south Florida. Essentially, I was the IT staff for the company. At the highest, my wage was about $7/hour, with no insurance or equity. I was there for about 2.5 years.
My most recent salary was $55,000/year at a megacorp as a "customer engineer", effectively doing sysadmin, development and project management, complete with frequent meetings, on-call and weekly after-hours maintenances.
I have 7 years of experience where someone has paid me to keep things running, 11 if you count the side projects and open source project dabbling, and I've never even come close to a 6 figure salary. Now I'm feeling bummed that I read over this thread.