This is familiar to me. However, I'm not sure you'll like my "fix". The PM should never be outside the discussion. The moment they become a separate entity,

This is familiar to me. However, I'm not sure you'll like my "fix". The PM should never be outside the discussion. The moment they become a separate entity, an unaccountable entity, dev can become more and more pathological. It is for us to stand up to that, communicate the difficulties in task estimation, keep a strict paper trail on when specs get shifted/scope creeps so that we have a well backed response when this discussion happens. I would even argue that in the same way the "brown nosers" are trying to make some positive impact for themselves, as risky as it is, you can do better by fighting bad product management. If you feel the pain, your team does, and likely, your manager might as well. (if it's also a separate entity from the PMs.) The loyalty and trust you can build by defending your devs and being a force for good can be absolutely invaluable as your career goes on. By and by, although I acknowledge the risk, if you shape your rebuttals well, you can find yourself bringing PMs to your side (a recent "spirited" discussion in which a PM was refusing to institute KPIs to track their features ended with their other PM peers questioning their resistance and backing the eng push for better telemetry, because when it came to "how can we justify how well we're serving clients if we _don't know_" this speaks even across lines.)