Device management is definitely a big hole to punch into each machine, but, once you're above a handful of staff, managing devices manually is not really tenable, and I do think the restrictions provided by device management have tangible benefits (it's amazing what people will download and run without a thought).

Arguably the risks of the MDM should be assessed and mitigated with some kind of defense in depth approach—highly sensitive things like bulk wipe disabled with multi-person approval required to re-enable, hardware MFA requirements, anomaly detection + alerting for weird behavior, etc etc. I'd argue the risks stem more from badly configured MDM where a compromise of one sysadmin's browser has a company-wide blast radius, rather than the fundamental presence of device management itself.