As someone who moved from an open-core, engineer-driven company to a closed-source, product-driven one - this is spot on. When this article says that startups used to not need PMs, it's true, it's just that the startups that were product-focused won and the ones that weren't were acquihired by the winners for their tools and engineers.

Whether product focus came from product-focused engineers or product-focused management, it didn't matter. "Startups didn't always need PMs" really means that before PMs, engineers used to have to be product- and value-focused - they had to care about customers and profitability - and more specifically the early engineers who worked for the winners were probably better at product focus than engineering.

Also, if tech PMs who haven't worked outside of tech before read this article and feel depressed or angry, remember that there are massive sectors - agencies, health care, construction, any level of government - that need tech-literate PMs to manage vendors and contractors. You'll be the only person who knows or cares what it's like to work in tech, which is often more than enough to ship projects. If you're not looking to become a product-focused developer (which, see above), then ride out this wave of anti-product sentiment outside of startups. I promise there's space out there.