It's quite rare to have the degree of control you're envisioning over a project. Most software teams are building products to sell to customers, and most customers aren't going to accept "IDK whenever we're done" as an expected delivery date. Companies can and should provide some degree of wiggle room, but it's not realistic to expect that you can avoid ever thinking about how long a task is going to take.
If everything is urgent, that is a strong symptom that you completely lost control and you should not be running a project.
The value you add as a decision maker is making decisions that mitigate the risk of being in a scenario where everything is urgent, that is, a crisis. If you are constantly in crisis mode running for your life because you failed catastrophically.
I’m not sure why you’re being so hostile here. I agree everything can’t be a crisis, and if there were a way to have people in the office only when something important is happening, I think quite a lot of companies would go for it. But you can’t set remote work as the standard and then announce that there’s crunch time in July so everyone has to come in 5 days a week.
Because the primitive and irrational need to hurry all the time for no reason is what takes 99% of the satisfaction of building software while making software worse.
Remote work is the future, and irrational environment-ruining offices are the past.
Again, there are many important reasons - it sounds like you're just too isolated from this to understand the context you're missing. You should find one of your customer-facing coworkers and sit in on a call some time if you'd like to learn.
You tell engineers that only you understand the customer, then tell the customer only you understand the engineers. But truly speaking you understand neither. It is just a sweetspot of information asymmetry, pseudoscience and falsehoods.
The days of middle management are counted. Everyone wants middle management and their endless excuses for not having hard skills gone.
If you are micromanaging you don't understand software and don't understand management.
Ding, ding, ding! You have won the toxic bingo.
If you work with 2 week deadlines you've lost control of your project. Like in Tetris.