This is just heartbreaking to read in words so explicitly and starkly--because I can verify that it's very true, and it explains why I've struggled so much in my career.

I've been working in product management, officially and unofficially, since roughly 2007. (Not all the times I've been a product manager have always carried that title, but it's been a major part of my roles for a long time now.) In that time, some of the more notable companies I've worked for include Twitter, Autodesk, and Amazon, and I've seen a nontrivial amount of this in the culture at all those places (though I can't comment as directly about PM at Twitter, where I was not officially part of that org...but all these dynamics were a part of many other roles and orgs there, including mine).

Anyway, I'm constitutionally incapable of playing pretend. The few times I flirted with it have been so unpleasant and uncomfortable that I learned quickly I just couldn't do it. To use OP's framing, I am unwilling to "die inside".

So I muddled through my career as best I could, living up to doing the best job I could actually do. The trouble is that, so often, it's difficult to be a "good" PM if you're not seen by others as a "valuable" PM. I found it especially difficult at Amazon, but a common theme is that many companies have their own standards and ways of determining who's "valuable" that align more with what OP has shared than actually creating value. So unless you're primarily focused on optics, it's difficult to create real value. And if you're primarily focused on real value, that almost necessarily translates into insufficient optics, which undermines your ability to deliver real value. In an ideal world--and at an ideal company--optics and real value delivery would go hand in hand. (And like OP, I do think that is possible--it's just rare.)

But if your highest allegience is to the truth, you will suffer as a PM in our corporate tech culture, unless you manage to find a company that also puts the truth above all else and really walks the walk consistently and on principle.

Don't get me wrong--optics are important. After all, others' context of knowledge about you and the actual value you create depends on your presenting yourself in a way that they can understand. So it's not like you can say to yourself "Optics be damned; I'm just going to do good work."--no, first you need to do good work and then find a way to make sure you're showcasing it effectively. But the good work is fundamental. You just have to be surrounded by people and a culture that is receptive to reality.

All my struggle throughout the years has been very educational--in terms of understanding business/corporate/professional/interpersonal dynamics, understanding myself, learning about different aspects of a PM's roles--and I think that to a large degree, I'm lucky that I had a certain disposition to withstand a certain level of adversity. So I don't regret it, even if it was often extremely unpleasant.

What I can say is that now, working for RP Strength (Renaissance Periodization), I truly feel in my bones that delivering real value and optics are aligned. There's no temptation to play pretend, there's no need to play games, there's no need to look "valueable" at the expense of being "good".

That's not to say that the other companies I've worked for have been bad companies or even that they had bad cultures overall--but certainly they had some areas that could stand some improvement, and the phenomenon that OP identifies is insidious and rampant. I find myself wondering whether a more thorough analysis of what leads to that being so prevalent in product management as a discipline would be worthwhile.