You make it sound like more fun than it usually is.
What you missed was the really bad part - upper management.
The best team managers I have had were good primarily because they protected the team from the whims and incompetence of upper management.
I never lasted in any management role more than a couple of years, because eventually I had to say, "I'm sorry, it will impossible to hit this arbitrary deadline you made up in a few seconds," rather than lie.
I might add that I've never worked as or for a happy team lead.
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I must confess that right now, today, I'm the "tech lead" of a project, but that's because I'm the only full-time programmer, and the management hired the most senior programmer they could, and then more or less left me to my own devices, which has resulted in not just a lot of work, but happiness.
I was unfortunately out for a couple of weeks with RSI, but I talked every couple of days with the rest of the team, and it was all, "We used feature X for the first time, it worked great!" and toward the end a bunch of new feature requests.
Management also comes from the mechanical engineering world, and that seems to be a huge advantage. They actively want me to take a little extra time to productionize the tools I build, which I love, and the result is better tools.
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Well, that last bit undermined my argument, but it's an exception. Usually team manager is a miserable job where you're trapped between your team members' reality on one side, and delusionality of management on the other.
One more story. I remember once I was in a small company with a top-heavy structure where I was the biggest producer. They were very nice, but one day I was in a meeting with the four founders were they were basically saying, "We know you're working hard, but you need to get more work out." (This wasn't going to happen, as I'd been working 60+ hour weeks for months, which I can do, but any more work and I would burn out.)
At some point, I laughed, and said, "You know, if there were one more of me, and one less of you..."
They were good guys. They laughed too. But they still didn't get it.
