Do we still need a manager who has power over the developers and partially decides which jobs exist, giving them not only an incentive to create extra work, but have a trump card on anyone who would call out their BS?
Do we truly need all this manual syncing and negotiating? Or has part of the corporate machine become addicted to all this red tape so much, they believe it is not only a necessity, but an insult to the individuals participating if the red tape is removed in its entirety?
Frankly, as much as I despise management work, I have a hard time buying the argument it really would be as terrible as it is now once you get rid of that red tape. Hybrid roles don't have an incentive to inflate the amount of red tape: they can go back to doing the other side of their role instead, and have an incentive to remove any existing red tape if it becomes suffocating.
For the former, a great manager will regularly ask, "What can I do to help you do your job well?" This person fights the political battles that need to be fought, takes bullets for the team, gets the team the resources they need, removes roadblocks, recruits, etc. The team already wants to work hard, wants to do their job well, and "manager-as-controller" is absolutely the wrong way to lead.
But when you're managing a team of undermotivated people doing more dreary work (which, honestly, might be most people and most jobs), a great manager will occasionally pick up a hammer and do some of the hard work themselves to boost morale. They'll find and remove the major pain-points of the day-to-day, improve training so the team is more productive, cheerlead a bit, try to improve compensation, make sure the team's major wins are visible to upper management so they can get the resources they need, etc.
But critically, this second type of manager ALSO needs to be able to crack the whip once in a while to make it clear that being deadweight won't be tolerated, and complaining won't be rewarded. When the work is somewhat painful, you really want to foster a kind of contagious, optimistic busy-bee state where everyone is eager to do their part and help one another, and you'll have to put on your "manager-as-controller" hat once in a while to get there.
Is that really how american workplaces look? Sounds incredibly dystopian.
Working in a faster-paced environment probably isn't the hellscape you're imagining: most foreigners I've worked with like it. Some don't. It is different, though - in England the slower pace of everything irritated me.
That is traditionally done by managers, but it doesn't actually need to be handled someone who is anyone's boss in particular. It's handleable, often with less overall effort, by people who are at the same level as every other team member on the org chart. The whole boss/report dynamic tends to inhibit clear communication, because circumspect people tend to to communicate less-than-candidly with those who hold the power to advance or inhibit their career progress.
PM work, management work and all of that is work, and someone has to do the work and if the managers / PMs don't do that work other people start taking up those jobs. That stuff doesn't go away with the magic wand of remote.
Yes there is an argument that those jobs make a bunch of extra work that may not of been necessary, but that also applies to engineers themselves. Every job role creates extra subjectively unnecessary work.
And I am saying this as someone who has been an engineer my entire career, I haven't been a manager.