Right - the best QA people need only be as technical as your user base. Owning QA environment, doing deploys, automated testing, etc are all the sort of things that can live with a developer.
They are there to protect dev teams from implementing misunderstandings of tickets. In a way a good Product Manager should wear a QA hat themselves, but I've seen fewer good PMs than good QAs....
Yup - I want to echo that the best PM I worked for also did quite a bit of QA work himself.
A deep understanding of the direct user experience of working with your product is a really valuable thing to have if you want to make users actually like the product. There's a WORLD of difference between the user experience that is mocked in a tool like figma or written down in a system like jira, and the actual live result.
As an aside, some of the most impactful engineers I've worked with also manually interact with the product incredibly often during development. If you automate a test too early with e2e tooling, you miss out on the wisdom gained by having to click through a feature 100+ times during development. Personally doing it exposes all sorts of rough edges and pain spots that your users are going to feel. Automating it makes you numb to them instead. It's a difficult balance.
They are there to protect dev teams from implementing misunderstandings of tickets. In a way a good Product Manager should wear a QA hat themselves, but I've seen fewer good PMs than good QAs....