You have rediscovered the job of Software Analyst, which until the early 90's was a thing. Then that all got upended and we ended up with a mix between product owners, project managers and developers / devops but I think that that ignores the fact that Analyst is a different set of skills.
I came up as a software requirements analyst before the weird transition between business analyst to product owner to product manager to technical product manager. But living in requirements for 15+ years really gave me a leg up on these “let’s go back to requirements!” efforts.
There is a lot of room to reevaluate the lessons of software development pre-web in the context of the current environment.
Like, if waterfall of a project can be done in 2 weeks, is it agile now?