I work in a "traditional company" and the gatekeepers were installed to keep developers from going insane. When we have too much information back and forth between business and engineering, the loudest complaints from the business side (where the $$$ comes from today and tomorrow) drowns out the team's and department's internal goals, which are usually much longer term (meaning the $$$ is in months or years, not next week).
I believe this is why the author noticed that certain types of companies had engineers say the product owner was one of the reasons they're more satisfied. From when I started at my role, my team went about 2 years without one, and then within months of having one, we have been much more productive and have managed to create much more immediate and future value for the company.
The trick big tech uses to solve this is to not just pay extra for above average engineering talent, they pay extra for above average talent in all areas. So the people you talk to are almost always pretty reasonable and understanding, they want things done and complains but they don't ask for the impossible or unreasonable.
I think it’s deeper than that - these companies place product/engineering at the centre of the business, rather than at traditional companies that still see it as a cost centre.
Product managers and UX engineers are there to do product management or UX design, not to filter information from the rest of the company to programmers. That means that most of sales requests are better forwarded to a product manager or UX designer, but there is nothing stopping them from directly filing a bug report to a developer and chatting about potential fixes/timelines etc. Also if some feature is important the product manager can just tell them to talk directly with the relevant engineer to get the feature done.
This is because businesses chronically underinvest in developer/engineering resources.
Developers tend to be viewed as something that is not "core" to the business, and generally only necessary on a project-by-project basis. So, projects are initiated, resource needs identified, and, since nobody wants to hire a bunch of full-time staff, most likely a consulting firm or off-the-shelf product is selected and configured.
The downside is now you have a thing that needs to be maintained, and probably it will be maintained by a limited pool of "in house experts", who are also responsible for just about everything else.
The net result is that you've got this centralized resource that is under provisioned and, well dear reader, what does your training as a systems engineer tells you will happen with a centralized resource that is under provisioned? Contention? Rising latencies and queue lengths? Disastrous to recover from failures?
You think they would be taken aback by the cost of a temp developer. In my case we easily charge the salary of two or three junior devs for one person and we are very sticky...not one contractor was out of work during the pandemic while those companies laid off FTE in significant numbers.
The problem arises when the gatekeeper either no longer understands or no longer cares why their position exists. Then they just become an obstacle to the very communication they are supposed to be there to facilitate.
I believe this is why the author noticed that certain types of companies had engineers say the product owner was one of the reasons they're more satisfied. From when I started at my role, my team went about 2 years without one, and then within months of having one, we have been much more productive and have managed to create much more immediate and future value for the company.