Yeah, in my experience, there is a BIG difference. Having a manager who is a bad fit for me has been far more difficult when I've been in management roles than when I've been in IC roles. And it was even worse for me when I was managing managers. Many of the problems (and many of the good things) created by my manager scaled up with the number of people reporting up into me. As an IC, I could minimally comply with any BS requirements and use the rest of my time to create actual value. As a manager, performance is much less directly attributable - it's easy to claim that anything less than full compliance is hurting performance, even if that's the opposite of the truth. Paraphrasing an actual feedback conversation...

VP: "I've heard for years that you're an incredible manager that gets great results. But now that you report to me, I'm confused. You can't even get your engineers to fill out the daily status reports I told everyone to do. I think your engineers stay at the company longer because you coddle them."

Me: "I think I get results because my management approach, among other things, doesn't involve engineers filling out such reports on a daily basis. I told them they don't have to as long as they surface problems to me right away so that I can keep stakeholders informed. I've found that this allows them to stay focused, leading to better project outcomes and happier engineers."

VP: (literally laughs out loud) "No, seriously, they need to be filling those out daily. You're holding them back."