Gregor answers this nicely in https://youtu.be/31qcPwAv8Zw. Yes, they should. But not to create production code, but to grasp the idea and concepts of new technology, being able to look at it from different angle and bringing it back to the development teams in order to use or to avoid it.
In other words, Architects must be able to run experiments, aka spikes, learn from it and talk about it.
Architects today are not trying to be the smartest person in the room, but making everybody around the Architect smarter.
Architects are both, technical leaders but also people leaders.
What is an architecture? Architecture is always there as soon as you have at least two parts in a system.
Architecture became more important again in the last years. Why? First, the notion that frameworks provide enough architectural guidance has proven wrong. Take JEE as an example. It's just not enough. Second, the rate of change has gone up, so software is evolving much quicker today than before. And change must be carefully applied in order to keep the software valuable for a longer period of time.
