I’ve worked most of my career without dedicated product management support (very early startups and internal infrastructure teams at large companies), having to do that myself (both as an individual contributor engineer and as a very technical manager). So I have to wonder how much has the industry changed, and how much has your location within the industry drifted?

Yes my view mostly from within large engineering organizations. And yes, what you describe is pretty typical for engineers (and especially founding engineers) in young startups. Doubly so if it’s a startup with a technical product. Large organizations always envied startups’ efficiency and pace because of that, which is why the traditional sense of product management has been handed to engineering teams. This has been happening in the enterprise side for a long over the last 15 years and predates AI as I mentioned. It’s just more collapsing of disciplines now which is the answer I was giving to OP’s question.