After I left the University and joined the private sector, I first joined a private company, then eventually ended up at a managed services provider, aka a consutant.  This was when I first got introduced to using Remote Monitoring & Management(RMM) tools.  I never needed this before, since previously, I worked with Desktops connected to local network and joined to a domain.  There was no need of RMM before.

By this time most users had laptops and many were working from home and not every organization had a Domain.  Even if they had a domain, remote laptops that don't connect to a VPN will lose their domain association and needed to be rejoined.  This was when 3rd party RMM software with local installed agents made a lot of sense.  It was too much effort to get every user to set up their home networks to have open ports connected to the work networks.  It was just easier to install one of those RMM agents and remotely manage all the work computers given to all the employees.  We used several remote control services, depneding on the company.

The one we mainly used was Originally called GFI Max Remote Management.  It eventually got bought by SolarWinds and for a time was named renamed SolarWinds, until their Orion product, also under the name of SolarWinds got hacked.  They then renamed it N-able, after another product that SolarWinds also bought to dissociate it from the poisoned SolarWinds name because of their Orion product infiltration.  SolarWinds had been buying up multiple competitors and bringing it all under one umbrella.  All of these products are basically Mobile Device Management (MDM) and they're fully invasive.  You can fully take over any computer with the agent installed at any time and didn't require any user approval, if you set the configuration to allow for that.  It allowed you to disable the system and wipe them remotely.

We already had similar control of Windows desktops in the Domain.  A lot of junior Domain Admins didn't actually understand how much control you have over Windows systems in the Domain as a Domain admin.  Too many only know the GUI and not enough command line, before powershell.  Most people just walked over to the desktop for support since that was quicker than figuring out how to connect to them remotely if you've never done it before.  There was already much more remote access and control over the local system with existing built in tools.  It just wasn't in quite the same user friendly way as modern RMM tools.

RMM is needed now that so many people have laptops and work from their own home network.  That's why they attempted Azure AD to capitalize on the Concept of AD in the cloud, but Azure works differently from AD, which is why they've decided to rename it Entra ID.  It's basically Microsofts MDM, but it's not as user friendly and is more overly complex compared to other 3rd party tools.