If they can't at least imagine the golden path themselves and write it down, they shouldn't be in charge of the product because they will be unlikely to understand any other in depth conversations about it. And I have no idea how they'd be having coherent conversations with anyone above them either. They're also unlikely to use AI well or not identify bad-out-of-the-gate solutions. It is of course different if they're just gathering opinions or want a PoC or exploratory work done, but those aren't requirements to me.

Developers are unlikely only doing development these days. There's ops and support to do as well, so more back and forth is less time doing those things and development.

We need to meet in the middle about requirements otherwise developers will end up doing someone else's job for them.