The respected and socially competent engineer should always fulfill the traditional PO obligations. I believe the buzzword for this is Product Engineer, even though that’s roughly what agile was supposed to be to begin with…
The problem with this is somewhat real though and it’s that companies do not prioritize this capability set over the “traditional” ones where the engineer never has to talk to a customer. Given that anyone that codes is at least probably lightly on the Autism spectrum, and you end up with only a subset that can successfully do both roles.