Here is someone who recently changed from IC (before I was technically leading teams for the last five years) to Engineer Manager (People leadership over the previous five months).

First, technical and people leadership are entirely different.

I agree that some companies will expect you to do both Technical and People leadership, and if it is the case with your opportunities, avoid it (because you are looking for work and life balance).

As a technical leader, I was always able to have a great balance between life and work while leading technically (and I am not a workaholic person).

As a people leader, maybe because I'm learning, my personal life is being put aside (which I hope is due to the transition time).

What does my day-to-day look like?

Before as a technical leader: coding (over these five years, it went from a lot to less than 10% to the most recent experiences); mentoring others from a technical perspective; reviewing and improving processes, guidelines and operational rules that support (or impact) the day-to-day work of ICs; automating tasking that was being manually performed by the team members (to increase the team availability but also to reduce human-errors); jump into incidents that no one else knows what are they about (even incidents that were not in the scope of my team); meetings with stakeholders focusing on requirements clarification, aligning expectations; planning product roadmaps, including tasks definition, estimations, delegations and risks analysis; jumping into tasks that were not going to the right direction (from technical or timeline perspective); interviews focusing on technical abilities (soft and hard skills).

As a people leader: 1:1 focusing on people's motivation, blockers, enablers and salary or promotion; driving projects to ensure requirements (e.g., functional requirements, compliance, security, timeline) are fulfilled and aligned with business goals and priorities; mapping technical projects that support business OKRs; allocating people's time into product projects, technical projects, presentations preparations; headcount related tasks (hiring, people replacement, and - not yet - people reduction); interviews focusing on culture, and soft skills

One thing to mention regards my scheduling is that, while technically leading teams most of my meetings were time flexible, or because the number of people involved were small, or because I did not have so many, which gave me flexibility to move my start or end time with freedom.

As a people leader, I have way more meetings, and most of them I have little or no flexible, which almost completely block my freedom, also the numbers of non-planned meetings that pop ups are in a such volume that regularly I have full days of meetings, which are exhausting and requires some time after to react to them, easily stressing my time management skills.

Very well put thoughts, thanks for writing them down, I am in a similar place as OP, and found your points very helpful.