Taste is pretty transferable, I think what you're talking about is intuition. The foundations of intuition are deeply understanding problems and the ability to navigate towards solutions related to those problems. Both of these are relatively domain-dependent. People can have intuition for how to do things but lack the taste to make those solutions feel right.

Taste on the other hand is about creating an overall feeling from a product. It's holistic and about coherence, where intuition is more bottom-up problem solving. Tasteful decisions are those that use restraint, that strike a particular tone, that say 'no' when others might say 'yes'. It's a lot more magical, and a lot rarer.

Both taste and intuition are ultimately about judgment, which is why they're often confused for one another. The difference is they approach problems from the opposite side; taste from above, intuition from below.

I agree with your assessment otherwise, PM can be a real smoke screen especially across domain and company stage.

> There is a segment of the labor market calling themselves "product manager" who act like good taste is domain independent

That’s definitely one of the biggest problems with product management. The delusion that you can be an expert at generic “product”.

We used to have subject matter experts who worked with engineers. That made sense to me.