I've long thought of the analogy as useful for human teams, and it even shows up in the corporate jargon (eg. "I'm blocked", "We need to align", etc). It's surprisingly common for whole branches of a large org to be doing net negative work due to conflicting goals or not realizing some implication that cuts across teams and local contexts. Sometimes these issues are technical but just as often they are pure product or business decisions with no explicit dependency until a lightbulb goes off somewhere.

With hand-written code, things generally move slow enough, and there's enough common sense sprinkled across the org chart that things can get uncovered organically. With agent teams, speed increased by several orders of magnitude and common sense is out the window, so I suspect the ceiling on productive use of agents will be far more limited in number than traditional engineering teams, and it will heavily depend on who and how humans are plugged into the right places.

One thing I suspect professional researchers underestimate is how much positive output can be produced by a human team with vague or hand-wavy direction, and surprisingly little deep thinking, let alone a robust specification or structure to keep them on track. The reality is any large team regresses to the mean, and it's usually a few savvy people that actually drive outcomes. These people don't necessarily have official authority, just a nose for the right thing. This won't spontaneously emerge from agents (at least until they become a lot more human like in terms of big picture common sense, and dial down the sycophancy to a more "skeptical engineer" level).