yes! I think this cultural association is a huge part of it!
I’ve been borderline obsessed with a handful of mainstream pop and pop-ish albums over the past few years (both albums by Lorde, A Seat at the Table by Solange come to mind) and “producer” in those contexts is such a critical role that goes beyond just setting up the recording equipment and mixing, and you can see just from looking at the credits for each track how the term is used to basically give credit to everyone involved in the track without getting into specifics that might work for other genres better.
How do you credit someone who comes to a studio for a session and mixes, taps out a beat, plays guitar for 10 seconds during the bridge of a song, and holds some pad chords? Listing them as a “producer” seems like a fine way to describe that to me.
Similarly, when bands are heavily involved in their own recording/production and list themselves as sole producers or with whomever they worked with, I think that makes sense to communicate that they were involved in not only creating the songs themselves but also how they are recorded. To go back to the Lorde/Solange examples, both of those artists are listed as a producer for each track, which I think speaks to their direct involvement and imprint on how their music is portrayed.
TL;DR edit: some music made by “producers” is bad or at least boring music that exists essentially just to extract money, and some of it is good music. I don’t think the term itself has much of anything to do with that.
