about that ticket we talked about yesterday

Unfortunately, you're right about as much as the original meme is. At my current gig, I've worked with half a dozen PMs, and while the majority of them were (seemingly) sweet and nice people, at least half of them would struggle to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the heel. Even with project templates and runbooks, we still regularly had to clean up after them because they didn't do part of the project or expected us to work on stuff that wasn't marked as being live yet.

I've definitely seen both extremes. It's insane the difference a good PM makes, but they're rare because of how much pressure they have to handle. It's an ungrateful job.

Acceptable ones aren't too rare, that is, ones that don't have negative productivity -- depending on the industry and company politics, in some places it's BS all the way down. Good ones are rare and stellar ones are unicorns as it's a dual mastery thing: You have to be good at both the technical aspects, as well as the people aspect, and neither of those two can be mere talent, it needs to be talent and education. Judging by Alice Cecile, being a systems ecologist is the right overall qualification.

Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they'd manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.

If an org can't find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It's not easy, but it's not rocket science.

There are definitely some amazing PMs, but I've met way more terrible PMs who don't know shit about fuck and don't care to learn than good PMs.