That works when there is 1 engineer and one marketer. When there are hundreds of engineers and many marketers you risk the marketer unknowingly asks an engineer who isn't the right one and that person over promises not realized the full scope of the problem and how it will affect others who are also making their own promises.

I'd rather have a (high!) chance of that happening as a mistake low down on the hierarchy tree, where it's just the marketer (or maybe a region's marketing team) and two engineering teams involved that have unfuck their situation, than high up at the top where the C-suite only talks about the roadmap with the marketers and the bad decisions just wash over the whole company.

Don't think there's any solution that fits all scales of head counts in all fields of work. Middle management exists because employing 1000 people to each do something specific is inherently a hard task. Are they doing the thing, are they stopping other people from doing their thing, have they signed this form, have they got their benefits for this, are they getting paid the right amount, etc.

You actually save a lot of hassle with hierarchy, in the people-wrangling group of tasks.

But I still think some inefficiency at the lower level between motivated product teams with a few mandates each, is a better long term bet than assuming the same reasoning for middle management to exist applies to other fields. Engineering/design/marketing isn't people-wrangling so we shouldn't assume the same solutions that work for wrangling more people work for shipping more products.

A company with hundreds of engineers and anyone of them can overpromise on some random feature?

Sounds like a widespread communication issue.