Most Product Managers should just be Project Managers

You are a great example.

It’s this mentality which is the problem — that only PMs are thinking about customer/biz success and so they must prioritize and figure out what everyone should work on and when it should be done.

Let’s do a rewrite in Rust. What does this engineer know that we don’t? Why would they say something so incredulous. What if they are thinking about the customer and biz but from a different angle.

Builders - people writing code and designing the actual functionality and experiences somehow became strictly “resources”. The thing that made tech great and allowed for so many companies to flourish was the tech/geek/nerd/hacker spirit that let those who write code decide what to do and how to do it.

Now, we’ve McKinsey’d the whole thing into boring processes that make work for people who don’t design or code. Jira, Google Docs, Slack, etc etc etc

Both can be bad. I will say that the best PM I ever worked with had zero technical skills beyond HTML and CSS. She was a master of clarity and communication, and she knew how to give developers what they needed to focus. At some point, technical ignorance is a liability, of course -- but I've worked with many "technical PMs" who are too tempted to "get their hands dirty" and cause more harm than good. If a non-technical PM knows what they don't know, that can be a benefit not a curse.

The other thing, related to the OP -- a good program (project) manager is worth their weight in gold, and I'm not sure a bad PM can just fall into that role instead. Good PMs help define the "what" -- what's getting build, for whom, what problems it solves, etc. Program managers do the "when" and socialize schedules, red/yellow/green charts, etc.