This resonates with me more than the other comments. I’ve done a lot of self-directed work, and I’ve worked at web dev shops. In the latter, the only complaint I ever had about Jira was that it was slow. My PMs were my favorite people; they were like my “operator” while I was heads down (in the matrix). They helped deal with the big picture and talk to the client while I pushed through tickets. Jira was perfect for that because they owned it and I just showed up to click the buttons they had configured.

In all my self-directed work with small teams- you’re right, we just needed a task manager. The overhead of PM would have been a net negative. We basically just needed to track our own conversations with each other.