It's a Google backdoor for your team to add more tracking etc.
The important point is that it's a backdoor for marketing (and adtech) teams to get around developer/security requirements. At some point, someone on those teams gets frustrated that their one-line code requests (just load this script! add a gif banner here!) keep falling behind in the backlog. That happens in part because the product team often doesn't care about marketing, and sometimes because developers know that "just one more script!" paves the road to hell. At some point the third-party that's trying to get their business going through your business convinces the marketing team to add GTM, the marketing team says to the dev team "Hey we need GTM to implement THIS script". This time, because the other side has promised them $$$ in terms ROI, the marketing team pushes really hard for it, and eventually a product manager approves the request to get them off their back. The rest, as they say, is history (at retro time, multiple times down the road).
Well the clue's in the name. But I'd argue that Google analysing metadata about who's loading what/when through GTM is a lesser evil, when compared to normalising everyone sticking megabytes of mystery scripts on their sites with the tool.
I'd say 'frontdoor' given that the standard first tag to implement is Google Analytics. But I am sure they also generate some data for their own use about the number and types of tags that each site is adding via GTM.
The important point is that it's a backdoor for marketing (and adtech) teams to get around developer/security requirements. At some point, someone on those teams gets frustrated that their one-line code requests (just load this script! add a gif banner here!) keep falling behind in the backlog. That happens in part because the product team often doesn't care about marketing, and sometimes because developers know that "just one more script!" paves the road to hell. At some point the third-party that's trying to get their business going through your business convinces the marketing team to add GTM, the marketing team says to the dev team "Hey we need GTM to implement THIS script". This time, because the other side has promised them $$$ in terms ROI, the marketing team pushes really hard for it, and eventually a product manager approves the request to get them off their back. The rest, as they say, is history (at retro time, multiple times down the road).