My opinion of professional project managers has been ruined by an experience 10 years ago where I was in a "matrix" structured organization. I had been warned

My opinion of professional project managers has been ruined by an experience 10 years ago where I was in a "matrix" structured organization. I had been warned about PM's in this company, but I didn't believe it because the PM I was working with was cool, approachable and seemed reasonable. Basically, he set insanely short deadlines always citing critical business imperatives. It was frequently impossible to actually meet the deadlines. We accepted it as a reality of the situation and didn't push back. One day, near the end of a project, I happened to be in on a "status update" call with upper management. The call was about a dozen people, all but a few in bullshit management/coordinator roles, including the PM (BTW, high PM-to-contributor ratio in meetings in itself should be a red flag). Throughout this whole project the technical side had been always under a timeline fire. We cut corners, poured on the technical debt like there was no tomorrow, abandoned long-going efforts at cleaning up our codebase, fought bitterly with design engineering for access to extremely limited hardware-prototype resources, frequently came in on weekends. We were always late. I had expected to be chewed out by the VP. Instead, the VP graciously addressed my PM and told him "Wow, thank you <PM-name>, we're really impressed that you guys were able to bring this in so early!". I was so pissed off, it didn't even occur to me to say anything. I found out later that not only was this behavior true, it was routine and encouraged by program managers. The PM's had been scoring huge bonuses for "performance" while the teams were always led to believe they were falling behind and always assumed our modest bonuses were just largess bestowed upon us even though we were "unworthy". I am not going to say we "don't need" project managers, but I think everyone working with them should be skeptical of whatever they say. Since then, I've gotten aggressive about making demands of project managers. If their primary concern is meeting deadlines, then it follows that you can "put them to work" for your team by making demands for resources, access, or information from other parts of the organization. If you meet the deadline, they're more than happy to oblige.