I think he has a point. These power structures exist for some good reasons as well.

The opposite thing (engineers engaging directly with customers) can eventually lead to customer capture of your engineering org. You shouldn't have a small group of existing, noisy customers directly driving your engineering to the detriment of other existing or future customers.

Microsoft had customer capture institutionally: the existing big corporate customers were all that mattered. It lead to rebooting Windows CE into Windows Mobile way too late to make a difference, for example. But it also meant that backwards compatibility and the desire to ship Windows XP forever were sacred cows.

There are also nasty games that can be played by soliciting negative feedback for political advantage.

Dysfunction can exist with any structure. It's probably best that there's some small amount of direct user feedback as well as the big formalized feedback systems, at least so that one is a check for the performance of the other. If the user engagement team says everything is good, but there are massive Reddit threads about how horrible the product is to work with and the engineers know it could be better, it's time for engineering to start addressing the issues alongside feedback to the user engagement teams.