IMO a lot of the product managers inserting themselves and being useless is good old school project managers pivoting to the new thing and doing the same old stuff. Likewise I do think product management should be part of the senior engineers skillset. Its incredibly useful. Conversely, there are also tons of engineers that dont have this mindset and want a PM to tell them what to do and a barrier from the rest of the organization... which boggles my mind to be fair