Architects that sit constantly in that abstract realm are useless (and they are not architects in my view). But there are architects that do exactly what you describe in your ideal world.
And that's why I had to go. What started out as the latter was drifting towards the former. In part due to the onwards march of IT services to cloud providers, but also attempts by the organisation to 'mature' their IT landscape, with the view that architects should certainly not be doing any actual engineering.
