That's the point I was trying to highlight in the "Treating product engineers as customers" sin section – the duality goes both ways. Sometimes the best thing for the company is to make the lives of product engineers better, sometimes it's to make them worse. You do whatever is best for the company, not for the product engineers.

but platform engineers are so far down the chain, it's hard for them to associate their work value to actual customer's benefits.

This is what we are discussing. A company can also choose to organize it some other way.