A lot of people are reading the rise of the FDE as a new title. I think it is actually a test of whether you can enter a messy system and leave it more legible.
The valuable part of forward-deployed work is not customer proximity by itself. It is the ability to reduce ambiguity across product, architecture, and execution without hiding behind any one function.
I have done versions of this job under different names for years, often before anyone had a neat category for it. You walk into a situation where the product story, the technical reality, and the operating model do not line up cleanly. Nobody is exactly wrong, but the system still does not work.
The useful person in that room is not the one with the most polished framework or the loudest opinion. It is the one who can translate between constraints, make the trade-off legible, and turn a vague mess into a sequence that actually ships. That work is hard to title correctly, which is probably why the category is heating up now.
The best "forward-deployed" people are not close to the customer. They are close to the truth.