Scrum is my least favorite part of my job, by far. I feel like I'm being treated as a child who can't accurately estimate project time, difficulty, or dependencies.
Yes. It used to be that tech companies built tech products and were run by engineers, that's what tech meant. It was glorious and I loved every second.
Now "tech" companies aren't really, they are actually in the advertising business or other forms of data gathering, movies, shopping, etc. All of which uses tech but isn't tech. So very boring.
And as you say then PMs took over from engineering and engineering has been reduced to a fast-food order cook with little to no agency, just bolt the right ingredients (or AWS components) together and give status reports every day. That's not creative engineering anymore.
Throughout my career, as tech became big(ger) business, I watched as management, marketing, and design, took away our keys. Scrum, as an example, and all that followed seemed to be a way for upper management to rein in engineering, give management "numbers" that they could show their bosses, etc.