Messengers.

Did any innovative product, at its inception, come from a 'product manager'? (especially at google)

They have their place in the org, but I don't see much creativity from them.

Good product people have always been visionary, lead by a strong sense of design and understanding of how to meet the user needs.

Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills).

Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.

This nails it (I used to be a PM, now I'm an engineer) The PMs job has become so much about process, that any 'product sense' is completely disregarded because it can't be measured objectively.

Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs

The original iPhone did very clearly and famously have a product manager. It was the same person that was also responsible to paper of CEO.

Ken Kocienda one of the first engineers working on the iPhone disagrees with you on that https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1529521111104299008?s=20

Trying to figure out what to rename Google Workspaces too. It's been two years, time for a new name. Also working on the next version of instant messenger to replace google meet since it is also a few years old. Maybe we'll see Google Hangouts 2.0.