There is similar pattern in other type of industries too.. As you grow in the career path, you move more towards management role.
If you write code, most of the time you spend on very small part of a big software. Your impact is very less on the overall product. Being an architect, you have more impact on the product
You certainly have more of an "impact", but that might be just that everyone hates you.
However I'll go with the nugget of wisdom in your post: Some coding involves lots of hard work to small parts of a program, so you don't have much overall impact on the product.
This is typically because you're doing it wrong. You're either using the wrong language (eg. C for a GUI product), or you're reimplementing wheels when you should be using a library, or you're not able to inspire others to join the project and help out on some details.
Or, very very rarely, what you're doing is ground-breaking and highly skilled. You can only write one line of code each day because it needs so much thought. This is not something that one often associates with "architect" and "program manager" in an organization.
