The best PMs I've worked with have very clear understandings of customer workflows and needs (or work towards developing them) and communicate those to the dev team. They also make sure to share customer feedback, whether constructive criticism or excitement/thanks.
It's really motivating to hear customers are happy and I don't know why a PM wouldn't share that good news.
It is valuable to have someone for the customer to talk to that is on their wavelength (often less technical and sometimes more domain knowledge), and who has more soft skills than you might seek in developers. Calming down an angry customer is a useful ability and that's not what you hired me to do.
However, sometimes the problem is just technical, and every game of telephone makes it worse. I have had two week back-and-forths which were eventually resolved by the agreement that OK, this nerd who does our implementation (me) can be on a teleconference with your nerd who does your implementation so long as us grown-ups are also in the call - and then it takes maybe five minutes to get to "No the digit five. Not the word five, the digit five." "Oh! Oh Wow. I never considered that. Sorry. Yes, it works now." and we're done.
I really valued time spent shadowing people using my software, one of our tools was for call takers, and I could see that the thing they're all kinda used to but have to keep working around is a thing I can fix with a CSS tweak, whereas the change their manager tells us should be prioritised is going to take months. I can land the tiny improvement next week, and make their lives better while their manager argues with my manager about whether the big piece of work is P2 or P3 and so on. The role I'm in theory taking next (if they get their act together and issue me a contract to sign) is more user contact again, and I look forward to being able to make people's lives better directly.
Yeah, it’s sometimes a bit distressing to interact with the users directly if you haven’t done so for a while, because you find out they spend hours a day on tasks you never even considered and can literally take away with a few minutes of work.
Asking them to tell you next time doesn’t always work since they just cannot imagine that the thing that takes them hours a day can be fixed in 5 minutes, forever. I think they unconsiously don’t want their hard work devalued like that.
They also don't have any idea where complexity lies in an opaque system. More than once I've heard about users wanting more control over how a certain view sorts records. Users will pitch strange ways of getting some kind of stable sort. When you realize they want a field tracking creation order or update time they think you invented the idea. (Good PMs can figure this out, too)
Outsourced operations like contractors are often neglected in the feedback loop. So are SRE’s and parts of the business that are less customer facing. This can lead to lack of purpose. Good companies make sure everyone knows their contribution to the whole.
It's really motivating to hear customers are happy and I don't know why a PM wouldn't share that good news.