I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.

The best PMs I’ve worked with were HIGHLY technical, either in the same areas as the developers or in adjacent areas, like product design, or the domain of the product

PM for retail company did long stints in merchandising at Costco

PM for spreadsheet company was a former banking analyst

Most companies hire under qualified generalist PMs who have to learn everything about their market from scratch; it’s very challenging and prone to outright failure.

Hire fewer PMs, and make sure they bring a key skill to the table. Let Microsoft and Google train the juniors.

The reason I can't stand debates like this is that the "most right" answer is highly dependent on the details of the organization. Strong opinions are borne from bad experiences and people tend to generalize the patterns they've observed first hand.

A small org with a founder who has a strong vision they are good at articulating probably doesn't need many PMs. Similarly, you might find teams with engineers who are actually very user and market minded and have the bandwidth to do some of that work. Or, in the case of Airbnb, you can essentially split up the role and assign pieces of it to separate teams (which, the more I hear about it, strikes me as odd.)

At the end of the day, patterns in roles - and the PM role in general - usually exist for a good reason. There's a critical set of skills that, when done well, are very much justified and should exist as a single role - not the side project of a developer or a designer.