If your job is that shitty, and you're that smart and good, quit and find a better job.
Now of course, some companies are better or worse than others, some managers are better or worse than others and so on.
Personally I don't see myself a manager because I lack the social skills. In some days I barely remember to do minor things like sending out an email to my team at the end of the day or ask about the status of some roadblock.
Ofttimes, what looks like meaningless corporate bullshit to a developer looks like valuable fertilizer to some other part of the organization, or to a regulatory body, or to something else that makes the company go. "looks like" phrasing was intentional here.
I was a damned good developer back in the day, and am working on being a good manager (of managers at this point). There is an insane amount of red tape that sprouts up over time in any large assembly of people. Some of it has some positive purpose somewhere; some of it has no evident purpose.
The best managers seek to protect their teams from unnecessary BS, but that doesn't necessarily mean eradicating it from the company. Shielding can be just as effective locally, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
The challenge managers have to face is balancing competing priorities. If you're a manager, you have customers/users that you need to please to keep the money rolling in. You have an executive who often has very strong opinions about how to please those users. You have employees that each have their own career goals and interests, which may not necessarily be aligned with yours. You have cross-functional peers who you frequently need to rely on for favors, and yet often speak a totally different language from you. And you somehow have to make all of the above groups happy, or at least not totally pissed off at you, to keep the organization functioning.
I dunno what your job description is like, but mine (as a senior SWE at Google) is "Figure out how to make users happy". If you don't face similar ambiguities in your job description, it's because there's a manager somewhere up the org chart who did all the messy work of listening to what everybody else wanted and somehow harmonized it all into something halfway buildable. If you have a spec you're following, there was somebody out there who wrote it. If you're getting paid, it means somebody out there sold the product, and that usually requires listening to all the customers out there and figuring out what they want in common. None of these tasks do themselves.
In my experience, it's usually _not_ the line managers but the people above them. I've left several jobs, but almost always wasn't because of my immediate manager.
That's the crux. If you really are that good, it shouldn't be too hard to leverage your skills somewhere better.
