[33W]

Yes and no. On the useful side, they own some of the process inherent in large organizations. But they also act as a conduit to push that process to team members.

In practice, our scrum masters have been a place for the PMs, Analysts, and QA leads to go as their positions have been displaced. I would like to see more technical scrum masters that can own technical impediments, but that doesn't seem to be happening yet.

I also think that spreading scrum masters across teams will disconnect them from the specifics of the work and allow them to act more as coaches than non-technical team members.