The management might have a strange vision of what it means to be a Lead Developer, as they call it a "Director"... where it is common, to solve technical problems on a daily basis, but still has to take care of the fellow developers. This is a position where one does not need to be a social butterfly, but it suffices to get along with fellow developers (which is a social construct of it's own) and the product owner.

He'll likely start to show some more contributions again, once he has more to say - which might be in particular about the software specifications, tooling and alike. While the development team has too little influence on these, it can indeed be frustrating. I mean, he already proven how much he is able to save and how much load he can take - and the rejection might have been understood as an outright insult to competence, likely made by very incompetent persons.