If you have other people working at your company or investors, politics will come into play.
It's rare to have a CEO that can decide things 100% by themselves and still retain talented employees. It's also super rare to have investors with zero desire to determine a company's direction.
Yeah, and you can also get rid of local politics by moving to the countryside and homesteading. And you can bypass national politics by homesteading on a ship or an island that nobody cares about. And you can just move to a different planet to escape global politics. But any group of people will develop some form of politics, and to do anything meaningful longterm, you need a group of people, not just an individual, why not get better at politics? It is inevitable you will have to take part in them.
I used to run my own business when I was a child, and made a lot of money from it. Paid my way through school with my earnings. There was no sales or marketing, and all I did was product and engineering, and at no point was I politicking. So no, it's possible (albeit difficult) to not be part of the meat grinder, I have done it.
Sure, to some degree it will always be there. But company size and careerist culture - both local to the company and differences between countries - makes it vastly different in presence.
I don't think engineers are universality bad/good at politics. It's just like anything else, takes practice.