Not 100% convinced by the conclusion. There is good project management which can be relatively fine grained, but it doesn't have to be micromanagement and it doesn't have to be a death march.

There are some basic red flags raised:

> Our project manager would be displeased when tasks took longer than the estimate and would immediately assign one of the other team members to work with the original developer to hurry it along.

Shouldn't happen just at the whim of the PM. A sane environment would work by a developer asking for help first, and it actually sounds odd that you have capacity for a PM to throw someone to just 'hurry up' tasks

> Whenever there was any debate about refactoring the code, or backing out of a problematic feature, the new guys would argue against it, saying it was ‘ivory tower’, and not delivering features. The PM would veto the work...

Why does the PM have a veto? No technical lead or management with balls? PM's need to manage the features of a release and changes to the plan. Any PM who says features are set in stone isn't doing their job. A PM's role is to handle change and execute the plan. Sounds like weak management.