Something that came up in a session earlier reminded me of how much I hate one of the utterly thousand percent useless questions on the survey that keeps coming up.
Something like "How important is it for you to take charge & lead the party" not at all somewhat very important".
Players were in DiA, specifically Idyllglen fighting yeenagu after a long battle with many gnolls, many dretch, & some powerful fiends worthy of a fight on their own. Much of the fight up to this point, artificer has been using web to lock down the trash for the barbarians he needs to keep arguing with about how all of those critters will swarm & kill their healbot if they don't clean up & many spell slots have been burned on it including one because guy with the shield cast fireball on a freshly webbed batch of dretch but all that is passed & the party is fighting yeenagu on a battle that looks like this
B1 barbarian1, b2 barbarian2, Y yeenagu, Druid, T 3d8+int temp hp generating turret, off to the side are A Artificer & V Vrock
Through pretty much idyllglen the artificer has been ignoring the vrock & imposing disadvantage on things like a marilith, barlgura, & other high cr nasties to keep the druid up with the turret & the moon druid's own heals. Due to the turret, the barbarians have pretty much kept at full hp or close to it but druid & artificer are running low on slots. Yeenagu is no slouch but the artificer is miraculously managing to keep everyone up aside from B1 who refuses to swing around to be within 10 feet of the turret or throw a javelin at the vrock because he wants to have advantage from flanking & doesn't care that the vrock is keeping the artificer from faerie fire yeenagu. Predictably a group that could have stomped all over & killed yeenagu is left needing to be saved by zariel's arrival
To answer the question, it's of critical importance well beyond extremely important for some characters to take charge & direct the battle in addition the inverse for other characters at times.
Exploring an unknown passage is the kind of situation a sneaky rogue or crunchy fighter/barbarian being in charge might be extremely important. A hectic fight where a god wizard type controller/debuffer/buffer is juggling the baddies might be the kind of situation where everyone needs to jump when that PC tells them to jump how they tell them. fight where damage is building or looks incoming is absolutely the time where the healer saying "no we/you need to do this & that because I can't waste healing on a stupid strategy.. so on & so forth
The question is problematic because it is both of those things & the same with nearly every situation including "do we go left or right">"actually I'm going to split the party" and both sides of "should individual PCs be powerful enough to ignore a healer/controller/etc trying to fill their role" vrs "should a healer/controller/etc habe enough clout to direct the party strategy".