That's the norm in any medium to large sized engineering organization. PMs set out what needs to be worked on and want to know the progress on these tickets. How is that unreasonable? Maybe it would help if you referred to it as a sprint board rather than a bug tracker?
Within the project I was assigned this quarter, I decide what needs to be worked on. Most of the tasks on my screen were created by me and represent details that my product manager neither understands nor cares about. They're involved in master tasks for deliverable units of functionality and inbound bugs/feature requests. My PM and EM like to hear progress and like to have some idea of what I'll be doing in the coming week, but I'll pretty often have and scratch an itch in the same day, without necessarily going through the motions of writing up a task. (We do have code review, and I'll probably mention it at standup). The existence and level of detail in a task really depends on the number of people who need to be involved and how much we need async communication.
If this is atypical, I'm terrified to ever leave my large engineering organization - it's a pretty great model for the work we do.
