My experience is every layer between the communicator and the recipient adds noise. It's like the game of telephone we played as kids. Some PMs are terrible and are 100% noise. Even the best are only 50% signal.

Give an engineer a clear understanding of the end need, and you have a tremendous gain in efficiency. I think there is a 10X benefit here that's similar to the 10X benefit from stronger engineering skills.

You still need PMs, though it's a different job that passing papers back and forth.