Someone who is functionally part of the development team but has more experience than others and some kind of supervisory capacity over technical direction is, in my world, a senior or staff engineer. Do you also have those? How are they different from architects?
How are you going to design database schemas if you don't know Postgres? Controllers and models if you don't know Rails? Components if you don't know React? I don't think design and usage are such separate skillsets.
Put another way, wouldn't you want the Postgres expert to design your Postgres schemas? Or the Rails expert to lay out your Rails application?
Again, I agree on that, my perception of architect is that it's a strongest software developer with a high specialty in designing systems.
It shouldn't be a person out of the software loop, it wouldn't make sense.
I never intended to create a low bar for the title, nor a separate role from "software developer". I'd expect the architect to still be a software developer able to contribute to the existing stack.
Having an integrated architecture team serves for training purposes and for overlooking the mistakes.
At the same time, it helps keeping the architecture team up to date with the codebase.
Why wouldn't you do that, if it's highly beneficial in both directions?
The fact that a separate team does design work has been proven to be wrong, of course we shouldn't do that again