It's a function of scale. Hundreds of engineers is very, very small scale. In an environment like that I totally agree that you can delegate these responsibilities to individual engineers and it's probably fine.
When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working together, those responsibilities become large enough that centralizing them makes sense.
Engineering management is just specialization of a role, based on the need to have a specialist fill that role. Just like a games studio with 5 people doesn't need a dedicated build engineer, but a game studio with 1000 people probably does.
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It's a function of scale. Hundreds of engineers is very, very small scale. In an environment like that I totally agree that you can delegate these responsibilities to individual engineers and it's probably fine.
When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working together, those responsibilities become large enough that centralizing them makes sense.
Engineering management is just specialization of a role, based on the need to have a specialist fill that role. Just like a games studio with 5 people doesn't need a dedicated build engineer, but a game studio with 1000 people probably does.