Counterpoint: we had a whole team of people seeming to fit your description, and I thought they were one of the most useful parts of our process. They mostly did sales support and product management, while also supporting and working closely with project managers. I suspect a lot of developers thought they were useless and over-promoted, but they weren't, their value was just not obvious to the developers. Now, you seem like you were in a good position to judge whether or not the guy you're talking about was actually useful, so it's likely that I just worked with a team that was good at this job, and you worked with one that wasn't, but (IMO) technical people are often too quick to judge the non- and only-partially- technical roles in the organization as being less useful than they really are.

Oh, also, if anybody's job is "produce documents", rather than "gain knowledge that can be communicated synchronously through conversation or asynchronously through text" then that's probably a smell. All those meetings after meetings are about the information, not the documentation.