No dismissal intended! Was agreeing with you on the premise of a barrage of difficult situations (=‘fires’) in the job. The kinds of challenges you list are to be expected and normal business as usual, but imho doesn’t have to make the role more taxing or difficult than any people-facing corporate job with some accountability. It’s luckily not a boring job either (ymmv, boring = unchallenging). Most situations line or middle manager faces have been solved countless times before, and either have reusable playbooks / mental models to start with, or can benefit from applied common sense and creativity. It’s mostly fun.

The point I badly tried to make was around EMs mental state & health - managing emotional coupling creates space, necessary for the EM to find pragmatic solutions, or workarounds for things far beyond control. (Not that occasionally the problems don’t keep me awake at night, but that was also true for technical challenges as an engineer.)