I am not sure this person has ever worked in a place without PMs (or people who do "the PM stuff") because nothing they are talking about is "about" PMs. PMs ar

I am not sure this person has ever worked in a place without PMs (or people who do "the PM stuff") because nothing they are talking about is "about" PMs. PMs are, essentially, the people who sit at the center of: customer desires, engineering resources, and internal priorities. They can also do more of course - they could manage the project, manage the team, etc. But they do not have to! You can have this authors' weird great-man-esq "high performers" who will happily rely on their PM to go to all the client meetings they are too busy being great to attend.