Yeah, it’s really hard to compete with a solution that takes engineers out of the loop. The biggest reason large orgs go so crazy with GTM is that it’s a shadow deployment pipeline that doesn’t require waiting for engineers to work a request, or QA, or a standard release process.
And sure, better prioritization and cooperation with eng can make the “real” release processes work better for non-eng stakeholders, but “better” is never going to reach the level of “full autonomy to paste code to deploy via tag manager”.
This is the same reason why many big apps have a ton of Wordpress-managed pages thougout the product (not just marketing pages); often, that’s because the ownership and release process for the WP components is “edit a web UI” rather than “use git and run tests and have a test plan and schedule a PR into a release”.