I've had your type of product owner, but I've also had a product owner that was an ex-staff engineer. Companies should hire ex-engineer product owners, not strictly people-manager product owners.
Technical background doesn't always help in my experience - it's just a different role. Creating great product requires deep technical expertise to understand where the cutting edge is, vision to understand how it can be expanded and business expertise to understand what makes sense economically. It's just not a manager's job, you can't perform it by collecting customer requirements in a spreadsheet.
