It's good to be skeptical, but I think the role is critical if done right. Someone described a good PM as "a conductor keeping the orchestra in sync". And eve

It's good to be skeptical, but I think the role is critical if done right. Someone described a good PM as "a conductor keeping the orchestra in sync". And even as you described - someone needs to be the layer to gather feedback from customers, make sure it's feasible to build, decide what to build vs. what not to build and when, make sure executives are happy, keep the designers on track and focused, etc. If that layer is lossy, then you simply have a bad PM (which doesn't mean there should be NO pm, it just means you need a better one.) Do you as an engineer want to be doing design reviews and giving feedback on page layout and usability? Do you want to be on 20 customer calls talking about the business, showing demos, and getting feedback? Do you want to present to the board what your next few releases are going to look like? Do you want to maintain a product strategy so that you have a source of truth to answer "should we build this?" You may say "yes" for some of those some of the time, and that's great and important. But if you're saying "yes" to all of that all of the time, then congrats, you're not actually a full-time engineer, you're a PM who knows how to code :)