I walked away from an otherwise pretty great offer over this once. At some point I decided I won't do NPD efforts unless I can get engineers/developers and end users together in some meaningful way, and not all organizations can even conceive of how that might work once they are big enough.

Unlike some I think PM roles can be very useful, but they build in failure if they are used as a firewall between dev and customers.

I have a different experience in Microsoft where engineers would communicate with their customers if there are issues. There is always a first line of support but otherwise it will be escalated by the support staff and the engineer will jump in. Google is a bit weird because they do not target enterprises that much, their revenue is from ads sold to ordinary people.