Not an expert on PMs (is anyone?) but my understanding is the value to the business is, as you mentioned, abstracting the need to manage SWEs as value builders and instead as cogs within the Abstract Agile Machine, in this Sick Reality the PM is Programmer Remade and we are reduced to function calls. Software makes a lot of money and plenty of smarter people out there have invented roles to extract some of that (your) wealth without having to touch Vim.
Due to the relative novelty of CS I think we're still going through the early motions of trying to mesh together a web of programmers from bootcamps to MIT into one cohesive corporate apparatus... eventually we'll land on something similar to medicine or other engineering areas where accreditation is prerequisite and individual cogs have a bit more agency due to licensing etc. Hopefully.
My personal, unsubstantiated, take is that we'll come to look back on this odd time, with the glacial pace and grift hierarchy of enterprise software, as quaint. Some startups are coming around to the idea that you don't need 6 person multidisciplinary teams for generic CRUD, pay one competent engineer those 6 people's salaries and you'll get it built unless it's something special - in which case you pay that engineer 60x and their name is Bellard.
Due to the relative novelty of CS I think we're still going through the early motions of trying to mesh together a web of programmers from bootcamps to MIT into one cohesive corporate apparatus... eventually we'll land on something similar to medicine or other engineering areas where accreditation is prerequisite and individual cogs have a bit more agency due to licensing etc. Hopefully.
My personal, unsubstantiated, take is that we'll come to look back on this odd time, with the glacial pace and grift hierarchy of enterprise software, as quaint. Some startups are coming around to the idea that you don't need 6 person multidisciplinary teams for generic CRUD, pay one competent engineer those 6 people's salaries and you'll get it built unless it's something special - in which case you pay that engineer 60x and their name is Bellard.